Global Research

It is no secret the global new coronavirus pandemic is causing an unprecedented economic crisis, but this crisis does not seem to have the same effects for everyone. Undoubtedly, there are those who are profiting from the global crisis and accumulating more and more money, while a larger part of the population becomes increasingly poorer and more vulnerable, aggravating the scenario of global inequality and creating small expectations for the post-coronavirus world. The concentration of income is heading towards an almost apocalyptic situation, where a small financial oligarchy accumulates a huge amount of capital, while the number of poor people increases exponentially.

According to data from the Wall Street Journal, in the first quarter of 2020, American banks registered 1 trillion dollars from companies and consumers. In parallel, the United States becomes the global epicenter of the pandemic, with more than 60,000 dead. Most of the money was received by the four largest American banks: JP Morgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp, Wells Fargo & Co. and Citigroup Inc. Apparently, the power of the largest US banks only increases. These four banks alone raise more than 590 billion dollars, practically double of the previous quarterly record (about 313 billion dollars). Each of these banks has already exceeded one trillion dollars in loans since March.

Contrary to what happened in the 2008 crisis, people and companies are looking to save their money in banks, instead of avoiding them. Interestingly, the pandemic and the world crisis arrive at an exact moment of instability in the banking system. In Italy, more than 100 banks were bankrupt before the pandemic. In Germany, the serious crisis of Deutsche Bank and Commerzebank could no longer be hidden. All of these were symptoms of the final stage of financial capitalism and of the age of unproductive profit. The great bubbles of the banking system have been multiplying all over the world, increasing its debts exponentially, so that nothing else could save such a system or the economic model it presupposes. Or, rather, nothing, except an event of the magnitude of a pandemic or a world war, which would cancel debts due to force majeure events, as is foreseen in most contracts worldwide. Thus, the system could be revitalized.

In fact, financial capitalism is very unlikely to survive the coronavirus crisis. The age of speculation seems to be coming to an end. Since 1991, capitalism has suffered from a structural crisis. Expansion is one of the basic principles of this system; it is a condition for the existence of capitalism. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the old socialist world was inserted into the global market, in order to exhaust the possibilities for the expansion of capitalism, which then begins its phase of decline. With specific regard to financial capitalism, we can see that this system arises precisely in the period of greatest stability of capitalism in the western world, beginning its structural and existential crisis in recent decades. The 2008 crisis puts an end to financial system, but it didn’t really overwhelm it, thanks mainly to the strong damage control investments applied by the American State in order to save its main banks, allowing the economic model to survive. Since then, however, the situation has only worsened.

It is curious why people are relying on banks. Fear of the coming crisis is having a reverse effect to that of many previous crises. Everyone knows that a time of brutal difficulties will come around the world, with increasingly harsh economic conditions. In general, companies are allocating their remaining earnings to banks or, in other cases, are preparing to take out giant loans for future investments. International society believed in the salvation of financial capitalism in 2008 and did not realize that that crisis killed this system forever. Therefore, the effect is the opposite: in 2008, people struggled to take their money from banks, now they run to keep it, as they see banking institutions as the only form of refuge in the midst of social chaos. In the words of Paul Donofrio, chief financial officer of Bank of America: “We believe companies viewed us as a safe haven in this period of stress”. It can only be concluded that these people are making a big mistake.

All this money invested will disappear and the world will face the greatest crisis of the contemporary era. The belief in the indestructibility of capitalism has deeply shaken people’s ability to analyze complex situations and establish plans and strategies. Banks will survive the crisis, but not the companies that take services from these banks. The global market will ruin, as already shown in the drastic fall of all stock exchanges. The people’s power of consumption will drop absurdly and large populations will be thrown entirely into poverty, so that the poor will become increasingly poorer – and we can include even today’s millionaires among the “poor”. The banks will save themselves and render the financial oligarchy an extraordinary profit by canceling debts and ending bubbles by the pandemic force majeure, thus making a select group of billionaires achieve trillionaires status.

Finally, what is on our horizon is a dystopian future, in which world society will be divided between a small faction of trillionaires and a large global mass of poor and precarious people.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

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A letter from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to U.S. President Donald Trump accompanied medical supplies sent to the U.S. from Turkey. There is little hiding that the U.S. is the most affected country from the coronavirus pandemic with over a million cases and about 60,000 deaths. Turkey too is also struggling with the coronavirus, with over 3,000 deaths and 117,000 cases, if official data is to be believed.

In the letter to Trump, Erdoğan said

“You can be sure, as a reliable and strong partner of the U.S., we will continue to demonstrate solidarity in every way possible.”

Turkey seems to be getting inspiration from China by engaging in “mask diplomacy” and is helping many coronavirus affected countries in a bid to try and create good will after it tarnished its reputation when it attempted to asymmetrically invade Greece with illegal immigrants in February and March. However, its mask diplomacy initiative with the U.S. is for a very different purpose than that with the EU, and this was revealed in a statement by Fahrettin Altun, Erdoğan’s Director of Communications.

“We stand in solidarity with the United States, our NATO ally, against COVID-19,” he said on Twitter.

U.S. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, then went to Twitter to thank Turkey for their donation of medical supplies and their “friendship, partnership and support” while emphasizing that “during times of crisis, NATO allies must stand together.”

Erdoğan’s relationship with the U.S. became openly confrontational as the Turkish president insisted on purchasing Russia’s powerful S-400 missile defense system that the U.S. argued is not compatible with NATO. Not only did Erdoğan resist NATO threats and purchased the missile defense system, but he opened Russo-Turkish relations to flourish to unprecedented levels.

Trump resisted calls from the U.S. Congress to impose sanctions on Turkey, and it has proven to be a masterstroke from the president’s perspective as he knew sooner or later Erdoğan would break from Russia. The Turkish president in recent months has become enraged at Moscow for not budging on its Syria and Libya policy. Erdoğan wanted Russia to convince the Syrian Army not to engage in a highly successful operation to liberate large swathes of Idlib, while also demanding Russia to force the Wagner volunteer group to withdraw its fighting force from operating in Libya.

As Erdoğan’s geopolitical goals in Syria and Libya failed and he wants to put the blame on Russia, coupled with the coronavirus putting a heavy strain on the volatile Turkish economy, he has no choice but to reopen relations with Washington to have some respite from the ever-increasing problems he is dealing with.

Yesterday, the Turkish lira plummeted to 6.98 for $1USD, forcing the central bank to burn other foreign exchange reserves. The Turkish Statistical Institute found that confidence in the Turkish economy is at its lowest possible level after confidence fell from 91.8% to 51.03% in the past month. Turkish officials said in April that Ankara was in talks with Washington to secure a swap line from the U.S. Federal Reserve. However, the Fed has not included Turkey in its program of opening up the credit line of accepting foreign currencies in exchange for dollars. As the Fed is yet to do this, is Erdoğan’s gift to the U.S. to convince Trump to allow the bank to open up a line of credit?

According to an Ipsos poll, 59% of Turks consider the coronavirus pandemic to be their biggest worry. This means the economy is taking a backseat for now, giving Erdoğan some respite from public scrutiny. But coronavirus will not be a pandemic forever and the economy will have to come to the forefront of public attention once again. It is for this reason that Turkey is pre-emptively attempting to recover relations with the U.S. and emphasizing that they are NATO allies. This is in the hope that sanctions against Turkey can be averted and some economic assistance can be provided to help recover the dire situation.

Although some thought Turkey was finally entering the multipolar world order and escaping the grasps of U.S. hegemony, it now appears that Ankara was only using Russia as a leverage against Trump who was not supporting Erdoğan’s ambitions in Syria. The Turkish president thought that perhaps Russian President Vladimir Putin would endorse and support Turkey’s Syria policy, but this too came to a dead end, thus forcing Erdoğan back towards NATO. Whether Trump will speak to the Fed to open up a line of credit to Turkey remains to be seen, but what is undoubtful is that Erdoğan has certainly increased his chance of this occurring as he desperately seeks a way to avoid economic catastrophe and find other methods of economic assistance outside of the International Monetary Fund.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Facing the Covid-19 pandemic, the US Congress rammed through the CARES Act — which economist Michael Hudson explains is not a “bailout” but a massive, $6 trillion giveaway to Wall Street, banks, large corporations, and stockholders.

Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton discuss the enormous financial scam with Hudson, who reveals how the economy actually works, with the Federal Reserve printing money so rich elites don’t lose their investments.

Full transcript follows.

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MICHAEL HUDSON: Just think of when, in the debates with Bernie Sanders during the spring, Biden and Klobuchar kept saying, ‘What we’re paying for Medicare-for-All will be $1 trillion over 10 years.’ Well, here the Fed can create $1.5 trillion in one week just to buy stocks.

Why is it okay for the Fed to create $1.5 trillion to buy stocks to prevent rich people from losing on their stocks, when it’s not okay to print only $1 trillion to pay for free Medicare for the entire population? This is crazy!

The idea is that only the rich should be allowed to print money for themselves, but the government should not be allowed to print money for any public purpose, any social purpose — not for medicine, not for schools, not for personal budgets, not for full employment — but only to give to the 1 percent.

People hesitate to think that. They think, ‘It can’t possibly be this bad.’ But for those of us who have worked on Wall Street, for 60 years in my case, that’s what the numbers show.

But you don’t have the media talking about actual numbers. They talk about just words, and they use euphemisms. It’s a kind of Orwellian vocabulary, describing an inside-out world.

(Intro – 1:58)

BEN NORTON: The world is suffering right now from one of the worst economic crises in modern history. Definitely the worst crisis since the 2008 financial crash. And many economics experts are saying that we’re living through the worst recession actually since the Great Depression of 1929.

Well joining us to discuss this today, we have one of the best contemporary economists, who is really well prepared to explain what has been going on in this global recession during the coronavirus pandemic. And specifically today we’re gonna talk about the $6 trillion bailout package that the US Congress has passed.

The Trump administration is basically taking Obama’s corporate bailout on steroids, and injecting trillions of dollars into the corporate sector. And today to discuss what exactly the coronavirus bailout means, we are joined by the economist Michael Hudson.

He is the author of many books. And in the second part of this episode we’re gonna talk about his book Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire. So that’ll be much more in the vein of kind of traditional Moderate Rebels episodes, where we talk about imperialism, US foreign policy, and all of that.

Michael Hudson is also a former Wall Street financial analyst, so he’s very well prepared to talk about the financial thievery that goes on on Wall Street. And he is a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.

So Michael, let’s just get started here. Can you respond to this global depression that we’re living through right now amid the Covid-19 pandemic? And what do you think about this new bailout that was passed?

(3:50)

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well the word bailout, as you just pointed out, really was used by Obama and only applies to the banks. The word coronavirus is just put in as an advertising slogan.

Banks and corporations, airlines, have a whole wish list that they had their lawyers and lobbyists prepare for just such an opportunity. And when the opportunity comes up — whether it’s 9/11 with the Patriot Act, or whether it’s today’s coronavirus — they just pasted the word coronavirus onto an act, which should be called a giveaway to the big banking sector.

Let’s talk about who’s not bailed out. Who’s not bailed out are the small business owners, the restaurants, the companies that you walk down the street in New York or other cities, and they’re all shuttered with closed signs. Their rent is accumulating, month after month.

Restaurants, gyms and stores are small-markup businesses, small-margin businesses, where, once you have no sales for maybe three months and rent accruing for three months, they’re not going to have enough money to earn the profits to pay the rents that have mounted up for the last three months.

The other people that are not being bailed out are the workers — especially the people they call the prime necessary workers, which is their euphemism for minimum-wage workers without any job security. There have been huge layoffs of minimum-wage labor, manual labor, all sorts of labor.

They’re not getting income, but their rents are accruing. And their utility bills are accruing. Their student loans are accruing. And their credit card debts are mounting up at interest and penalty rates, which are even larger than the interest rates. So all of these debts are accruing.

The real explosion is going to come in three months, when all of a sudden, this money falls due. The governor of New York has said, “Well we have a moratorium on actually evicting people for three months.” So there are restaurants and other people, individuals, wage-earners, who are going to be able to live in their apartments and not be evicted. But at the end of three months, that’s when the eviction notices are going to come. And people are going to decide, is it worth it?

Well, especially restaurants are going to decide. And they’re going to say, “There is no way that we can make the money to pay, because we haven’t had the income to pay.” They’re going to go out of business. They’re not going to be helped.

The similar type of giveaway occurred after 9/11. I had a house for 20 years in Tribeca, one block from the World Trade Center. The money was given by the government to the landlords but not to the small businesses that rented there — the Xerox shops and the other things. The landlords took all of the ostensible rent loss for themselves, and still tried to charge rent to the xerox shops, the food shops, and ended up collecting twice, and driving them out.

So you’re having the pretense of a bailout, but the bailout really is an Obama-style bailout. It goes to the banks; it goes to those companies that have drawn up wish lists by their lobbyists, such as the airlines, Boeing and the large banks.

The banks and the real estate interests are going to be the biggest gainers. They have changed the real estate law so that the real estate owners, for a generation, will be income tax free. They are allowed to charge depreciation, and have other fast write-offs to pretend that their real estate is losing value, regardless of whether it’s going up and up in value.

Donald Trump says that he loves depreciation, because he can claim that he’s losing money, and gets a tax write-off, even while his property prices go up.

So there’s a lot of small print. The devil is in the small print of the giveaway. And then President Trump has his own half-a-trillion-dollar slush fund that he says he doesn’t have to inform a Congress or be subject to any Freedom of Information law. He gets to give to his backers in the Republican States.

And states and municipalities are left broke. Imagine New York City and other states. Most states and cities, have balanced budget constitutional restrictions. That means they’re not allowed to run a deficit.

Now if these states and cities have to pay unemployment insurance, and have to pay carrying charges on the schools and public services, but are not getting the sales taxes, not getting the income taxes, from the restaurants and all the businesses that are closed, or from the workers that are laid off, they’re going to be left with a huge deficit.

Nothing is done about that. There has been no attempt to save them. So three months from now, you’re going to have broke states, broke municipalities, labor that cannot, whose savings was wiped out.

As I’m sure you’ve reported on your show, the Federal Reserve says that half of Americans do not have $400 for emergency saving. Well now they’re going to be running up thousands of dollars of rent and monthly bills.

So the disaster is about to hit. They will not be bailed out. But no major investor, really will lose. You’ve seen last week, the stock market made the largest jump since the depression — the largest jump in in 90 years. And that’s because Trump says, “The economy is the stock market, and the stock market is the One Percent.”

So from the very beginning, his point of reference for the market and for the economy is the One Percent. The 99 Percent are simply overhead. Industry is an overhead. Agriculture is an overhead. And labor is an overhead, to what really is a financialized economy that is writing the whole bailout.

It’s not a bailout — it’s a huge giveaway that makes them richer than they ever were before.

(10:48)

BEN NORTON: Yeah and Michael, related to that — you mentioned that fine print is important. But I also have a kind of bigger question. And I don’t really know where exactly these numbers come from.

Officially the bailout is $2 trillion. Many media outlets reported it as effectively $4 trillion. But actually, according to Larry Kudlow — who is the director of the US National Economic Council, he’s the Trump administration’s kind of chief economist — Larry Kudlow is now saying that it’s actually $6 trillion in total, which is a quarter of all of US GDP.

And that includes $4 trillion in lending power for the Federal Reserve, as well as $2 trillion in the aid package.

So there is discussion of this aid package, but actually the aid package of $2 trillion is actually half the size of the $4 trillion that is given to the Federal Reserve.

What exactly is that $4 trillion that the Federal Reserve has? Is this some kind of slush fund, or how does it work?

(11:52)

MICHAEL HUDSON: No, the Federal Reserve was given special powers to create 10 times as many loans or swaps as others. The Federal Reserve represents the commercial banks and commercial investors.

Now here’s the problem: a lot of companies were issuing junk bonds. They were going way down in price, especially junk bonds for the fracking industry. The Federal Reserve says, “We’re going to be backed up by the Treasury. We can just create — as you know, Modern Monetary Theory — we can just create money on a computer, and swap. So we will, say, ‘Give us your poor.’ It’s like the Statue of Liberty: ‘Give us your poor, your oppressed,’ or Aladdin’s old lamps for new: Give us your junk bonds, and we will give you a bona fide Federal Reserve deposit.”

So the Federal Reserve has been pumping trillions and trillions of dollars into the stock market. That’s what’s been pushing up the stock market, the Federal Reserve. The bailout has gone to the stock market. As if the stock market got coronavirus! Stocks don’t get coronavirus! They don’t get sick on the virus! And yet it’s the stock market that’s going up through the Federal Reserve.

There’s also another $2 trillion dollars, $2 to $4 trillion that the US government has, over and above the $2 trillion that’s going to the people. So most of the calculations that have been published cite it as a $10 trillion bailout. Of which the newspapers, to avoid embarrassing Mr. Trump, only refer to the money given to the the wage earners. And they’re sort of embarrassed that the vast majority are given to the financial sector that doesn’t need a bailout, but that doesn’t want to lose a single penny from the virus.

So when you see the stock market recovered almost to what it was before the virus, while the economy is going down, you realize, wait a minute they’re saving the 1 percent, or the 10 percent of the population that own 85 percent of the stocks and bonds. They’re saving the banks. They’re not saving the people, and they’re not saving the economy; they’re not saving industry; and they’re not saving small businesses.

So it’s an amazing hypocrisy that the mainstream press is not discussing, which is why your show is so important.

(14:29)

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah and here in Washington, DC, we got I think $500 million from the, I guess what you accurately describe as the stock market bailout. And that’s a lot less than a number of red states that are less populous than Washington, DC got. So there’s a massive shafting here.

And then the city has only been able to provide for certain parts of the economy. Undocumented immigrants, who do a lot of work here, got nothing from the city. Vendors, which are a big part of the informal economy in DC, even though they have to be regulated, got nothing.

And then you mention all of these sectors of the economy — young people, college-educated young people who are deep in debt, and therefore less inclined to spend — are getting shafted here.

So you have called for a solution — well I guess, knowing so many of those people, they contribute so little to the economy because they can’t; they’re just putting all their money into debt. So you have called for a debt jubilee.

You say that debts that can’t be paid won’t be, and this is the best way out.

Maybe you can explain to our viewers and listeners what that is and why it would be the best remedy?

(15:42)

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well here’s what happens if you don’t write down the debts that are just going to accrue in the next three months: If you don’t say, “The rents will not have to be paid, and workers will not have to pay the debts that mount up,” if you leave those debts on the books, and you make the workers liable to keep paying the student debts, and the other debts, and the mortgage debts, and the rents, then they’re not going to have any money left to buy goods and services.

When it’s all over, they’re going to get their paychecks, and off the top is going to be the wage withholding, and the tax withholding, and the Medicare, and if they don’t want to get kicked out of their houses, they’re going to have to pay all of this money that’s accrued while they’re not making an income.

So you’re going to have a shrinkage of the economy, a vast shrinkage. How can they afford to buy anything but the most basic necessities, the cheapest food, the necessary transport? Obviously they’re not going to buy the kinds of goods and services that are supposed to be part of the circular flow.

Economics textbooks say employers pay the workers so the workers can have enough money to buy what they produce. But the workers don’t spend their income only on what they produce. They spend most of their income on rent, on debt service, on taxes, on finance, insurance, and real estate. And this is the only part of the economy that is being enabled to survive.

So how can you have the superstructure of rents and debts, of insurance charges, on an economy that doesn’t have the income to buy goods and services? And if they can’t buy goods and services, you’re going to have the stores closing down, because people can’t afford to buy what the stores are selling.

You’re going to have a whole wave of closures. And you’re going to go down the streets, and certainly in cities like New York, or where I live in Queens, just outside of Manhattan, where block after block, they’re going to be “For rent” signs. It’s going to be empty.

And the only way to avoid that is for a debt write-down.

Now you’ve had this occurring for 5,000 years. I’ll give you an example that may be easy to understand.

In Babylonia, we have the Laws of Hammurabi, in 1800 BC. One of the laws says that when you would buy beer or other things, they would write it on a tab in the bar, in the ale house, and all the debts were owed when the harvest was in. You’d pay the debt seasonally.

Well Hammurabi said, if there’s a drought, or if there’s a flood, then you don’t have to pay the debts. Most debts were owed to the palace, and others.

The implied policy is that, “The reason we’re doing this is, if we don’t do that, then you’re going to have these debtors become debt servants, bond servants to the creditors; they’re going to owe their labor to the creditors; they’re going to lose their land to the creditors; and they won’t be able to work on public infrastructure projects; they won’t work for Babylonia; they won’t serve in the army, and we can be invaded; and they won’t be able to use their crops as taxes, because they’ll owe the crops as debts. So we’re going to write it down.”

So the whole idea for thousands of years, of every Near Eastern ruler starting his reign by writing down the debts, was to begin everything in balance.

Because they realized, just mathematically, debts grow at compound interest. You’ve seen the coronavirus increase at an exponential rate. That’s how debts accumulate interest, at an exponential rate.

But the economy grows in an S-curve, and then it tapers off. The American economy, the GDP since the Obama bailouts of 2008, the entire growth of the GDP has only accrued to 5 percent of the population. 95 percent of the GDP. But the population for 95 percent, the industry and agriculture, that’s actually gone down.

So we’re already in a 12-year depression, the Obama depression, that they like to call a recession, because most of the media are Democratic Party people.

But you’re going to have this recession turn into a genuine depression, and it will continue until the public debt, that is state and local debts, are written down; the mortgage debts written down; and the personal debts written down, starting with the student loans, the most obviously unpayable debt.

And the choice is, do you want to depression, or do you want the banks to be able to collect all the economic surplus for themselves? Well Donald Trump, supported unanimously by the Democratic Congress, says, “We want to protect the banks, not the population, not the economy. Let the economy shrink, as long as our constituents, the donor class, are able to avoid making a loss. Let’s make the loss borne by the 99 percent, not our donor class.”

(21:17)

BEN NORTON: Yeah, and Michael, you mentioned something, getting back to the Federal Reserve and understanding how this whole system works. I mean frankly it seems to me to kind of be a house of cards.

But you mentioned this idea of Modern Monetary Theory and just kind of creating money out of nothing. Can you talk more about that? You know this is a term that’s become more prominent, especially on the left: MMT, modern monetary theory.

There are socialists who argue in support of MMT and then there are others who are kind of skeptical of the whole notion that you can just print all this money to fund these social programs that you want to create, and that it won’t create inflation.

But at the same time, you and other people point out that that’s exactly how the economy already works. Where for instance, you want to fund a war, there’s never — you know frequently when someone on the left asks for universal health care or free public education, members not only of the Republican Party but many neoliberal Democrats often say, “Well yeah, where are you gonna get the money from?” And the response of some of the MMT supporters is, “Well we just fund the program, and we just create the money because we control the creation of the dollar.”

And we see that same attitude used actually by the Federal Reserve right now, but to bail out Wall Street. “Yeah we’re just gonna print” — they printed $1.5 trillion, and then just gave it, they just injected it right into Wall Street.

So does that not create inflation, or what exactly is happening economically there? I mean to me, it seems like a scam; it seems like totally a scam.

(22:59)

MICHAEL HUDSON: Since 2008, you have had the greatest inflation of money in history. And you have also had the greatest inflation in history, but it’s entirely asset price inflation.

You’re absolutely right: the money has gone into the stock market and the bond market, to support bond prices, meaning you’ve had the biggest bond boom in history. You’ve had a huge stock market boom. But consumer prices have gone down. So here you have an enormous amount of money creation, and consumer prices and real wages have been drifting down.

So they are really two economies. The question is, are you going to create money for public purposes by spending it into the economy, on industry, agriculture, and the goods and service production and consumption economy Or, are you going to put it into the financial economy?

Well the whole way of our banking system is that banks create credit. If you go into a bank and you take out a loan, you say, I’m gonna borrow $5,000 for something. The banker doesn’t go and say, let me see if we have any money to loan you; he says, okay I will write a loan on my computer. I will credit your deposit with $5,000, and you will sign this IOU, and we have an asset. And the asset is $5000, on which we’re going to charge interest on what we pay you.

So it’s just done by computer, on a balance sheet. And as long as money is created on a computer, the only cost is the electricity used to make that debt record.

Now the banks, when they make loans, 80 percent are against real estate. So they say, in case you can’t pay, you’re pledging your real estate – the home you’re buying, or the commercial building you’re buying, as collateral. So we’ll lend you up to 80 percent, maybe 100 percent, of the value of what you’re buying, and that’s the collateral we have.

So they lend against collateral. Well, if you lend the money against collateral to buy a building, or to buy stocks and bonds, which are the other collateral, then obviously this money you’re creating to buy houses, or commercial real estate, or stocks and bonds are going to bid the price up.

Banks don’t give loans for people who say, I want to go shopping and buy more goods because I need the money. That may be a little bit, that’s what credit cards are for, but that’s a small portion of the overall money supply. So banks don’t make loans to buy goods and services; they make loans to buy assets that obviously inflate the price of assets.

And the more money that you pay for houses that are rising in price, or medical insurance, or stocks and bonds, to make a retirement income for your pension fund; the more money you pay for houses that are inflating in price because of bank credit, the less money you have to buy goods and services.

So actually, the more money they create, the more consumer prices for goods and services fall. It’s the exact opposite of the usual theory.

On my website I have many articles about that, and I have something today in Counterpunchon that. It’s on how the economy works the opposite of the way the textbook says.

Now unfortunately the left-wing doesn’t really study finance and money much. The discussion of finance and money has been monopolized by the right-wing, so left-wingers think, they don’t realize that they’re picking up a kind of junk theory of monetary relations and debt relations that’s all picked up from the right-wing of the political spectrum.

It’s a kind of parallel universe. That’s not how the economy really works, but in a way that sort of is easy to understand. And it’s very easy to make an erroneous, oversimplified view of the world easy to understand.

And when it’s repeated again and again and again, in the media, the New York Times and MSNBC, people really think that, well, maybe that’s how the world works — more money is going to push up prices, so we better not push for it, we better go along with trickle-down theory.

And most of the left believes in trickle-down theory. The Democratic Party leadership is absolutely convinced, if you just give enough money to the top 1 percent, or 5 percent, or Wall Street, it’ll all trickle down.

(27:49)

BEN NORTON: Well of course the Democratic Party is not the left.

MICHAEL HUDSON: That’s right, but it pretends to be. And it has crowded out the left. You can see in the recent election primaries that its job is to protect the Republican Party from any critique by the left, interjecting itself in between the Republican Party and any possible reform movement.

BEN NORTON: Exactly.

(28:20)

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well they stood up really strongly against the bailout — I mean what was it, 96 to nothing? And in the voice vote, I was listening to the voice vote last night in the House; I didn’t hear AOC’s voice against it.

MICHAEL HUDSON: They did a voice so that everybody could say, “Oh it wasn’t me!”

MAX BLUMENTHAL: No, no! So you mentioned that foreclosure king Steve Mnnuchin gets like a $500 billion slush fund. I haven’t heard much discussion about that. What will he do with this sort of opaque slush fund, and how will this — I mean it’s a leading question, but how will this kind of reinforce or consolidate inequality for the next generation?

(29:10)

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well gee, I hope he gives some of it to Kamala Harris, who was the attorney general who let him do all of this, and who thoroughly backed him and led the foreclosure, was the iron fist behind his foreclosure program. So I’m sure he’ll press for Kamala to be the vice president on the ticket.

The Democrats have a problem. How can they guarantee that they have their candidate win? Their candidate is Donald Trump. How can they make sure that they have such a weak candidate that he’s sure to lose to Donald Trump? And the choice is, we’ll get a vice president that’s so unpopular that they’re sure to lose.

Now it’s a race between Kamala Harris and the Minnesota lady.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Klobuchar? The one who throws staplers at her staff. She seems very charming.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Uh, I don’t know about that. But my wife can’t even look at her on television. But I think that the pretense is that she’ll help get Minnesota, as if Minnesotans, where I’m from, are so dumb just to vote for somebody from there. But by getting Minnesota, they’ll lose the whole rest of the country.

So I think she’ll be the vice president, because that guarantees a Trump victory. And that will enable the Democrats to say, here — they’ll have the president they want, that is for their donor class, but they can say, “That’s not us; that’s the Republicans.” So that’s the Democratic strategy.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Right, then they can raise loads of money for the “Resistance,” and all of the outside think tanks. And that was the old Republican, William F. Buckley strategy, is we’re better throwing rocks outside the building and raising a ton of money for the National Review than actually having to govern. And that seems like the Democratic strategy.

But I guess I was asking about how you see the economy transforming, because the Obama bailout sort of transformed it or consolidated the gig economy, where everyone has to work three to five jobs, and what was supposed to be a highly educated middle class is deeply in debt.

Where do you see it after this next tranche of stock market bailouts?

(31:29)

MICHAEL HUDSON: Ok, let’s look at three months from now. Smaller companies are going to be squeezed, because all of their expenses are going to go up. Small companies have had to run up debts, and they have all sorts of other problems, and their earnings, their prospective profits, are not going to look that good. Because there’s not going to be a market for the things that they sell, because of the debt deflation that I talked about.

So what’s going to happen? You’re going to have a bonanza for private equity capital. The liquid, the 1 percent that have access to bank credit and have their own equity capital are going to come in and pick up a lot of real estate that’s going to be defaulted on — just like they did after Obama evicted his constituency, the mob with pitchforks, and evicted them.

Blackstone will pick up more real estate. Big companies are going to pick up small companies. You’re going to emerge with a highly monopolized economy, much more centralized.

The important thing to realize about free-market economics and libertarianism, is libertarians advocate central planning, The Chicago School of monetarists advocate central planning; the free marketers want central planning. But the banks are to be the planners, not the government. They want to exclude the government from planning, except to the extent that they can take over the government, as Trump has done, and plan all of the income to be transferred to themselves from the rest of the economy.

So we’re going to have a much more centrally planned by a coalition of monopolies and the government. In the 1930s, that was called fascism.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: It’s what we call a “public-private partnership” or something.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Right.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Just really quickly, and maybe we can kind of transition after this, but you mentioned Blackstone. I think this is one of the key components of the bailout. They own so much stake in so many of the companies getting bailed out. Can you just describe their role and what they are?

(33:38)

MICHAEL HUDSON: It’s appropriate that they were put in charge of bailout. So if they’re the largest company buying up defaulted real estate and buying, picking up the weak — it’s called moving assets from the weak hands to the strong — then they might as well be put in charge, because they’re going to be the company doing all the grabbing. So of course they’re in charge of it.

It’s called grabitization. That was the Russian word for privatization in the 1990s. So grabitization is I think a better word than public-private partnership. It’s not really a partner; it’s sort of a one-way partnership; there’s one subsidiary partner. It’s really financialization and grabitization.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Right, just the looting of state assets.

BEN NORTON: Going back one step here, Michael, you were talking about the way that people should think about how the economy actually works. And I mentioned MMT. Can you kind of just walk through that again? Because you were talking about how actually, when the Fed creates — I mean really to me, as someone, I’m definitely not an economics expert, I just don’t understand really how this whole process works, because to me it just seems simply like, they’re literally just creating money and just giving it to banks, and corporate elites, and rich people.

I mean maybe that’s what it is. But I don’t understand, this is like the biggest scheme I can imagine, where the Federal Reserve is creating all of this money, printing — they’re physically printing money is my understanding. And then they’re just giving it to these banks, to bondholders. And then, but you said that what does is, instead of actually creating inflation, all that does is, if I understood correctly, it boosts the value of assets like real estate, while at the same time deflating wages and commodity prices.

So if that’s the case, then how should people who are advocating for socialized programs like Medicare for All, free public education, and maternity leave, and childcare, and all of these programs that the Bernie Sanders campaign and movement have been advocating for, how should we talk about the way to pay for all of those programs, if the reality of the economy is that the Fed is printing trillions of dollars, and then just giving that cash to banks?

(36:11)

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well I think the reason you’re having trouble understanding MMT is because what you described is what’s happening, but you think, “But that’s unfair!” And there’s a tendency to think, if it’s unfair —

MAX BLUMENTHAL: It’s not just unfair. It’s the biggest scheme I can imagine. There’s no other word other than just a con scheme.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes, and the brain recoils from thinking, “Can the government really be doing that to us?” Well, yes it can.

And just think of when, in the debates with Bernie Sanders during the spring, Biden, and Klobuchar keep saying, ‘What we’re paying for Medicare-for-All will be $1 trillion over 10 years.’ Well here the Fed can create $1.5 trillion in one week just to buy stocks.

Why is it okay for the Fed to create $1.5 trillion to buy stocks to prevent rich people from losing on their stocks, when it’s not okay to print only $1 trillion to pay for free Medicare for the entire population? This is crazy!

The idea that only the rich should be allowed to print money for themselves, but the government should not be allowed to print money for any public purpose, any social purpose — not for medicine, not for schools, not for personal budgets, not for full employment — but only to give to the 1 percent.

People hesitate to think that. They think, ‘It can’t possibly be this bad.’ But for those of us who have worked on Wall Street, for 60 years in my case, that’s what the numbers show.

But you don’t have the media talking about actual numbers. They talk about just words, and they use euphemisms. It’s a kind of Orwellian vocabulary, describing an inside-out world that they’re talking about.

They will buy stock; they’ll say we’re going to buy a million shares of Boeing; they’ll just write a check, and the check will be from the Federal Reserve, and Boeing will get the money. The Federal Reserve can create a deposit, just like a banker will write you a loan when you go in and borrow. It’s done on a computer – without levying taxes. The Fed can do the same thing.

Stephanie Kelton, my department chairman for many years at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, describes this. The University of Missouri’s website, New Economic Perspectives has a description of it. So if people want to google either her, UMKC, or what I’ve written, or Randall Wray at the Levy Institute, you’ll get walked through.

If you’re not already thinking in terms of balance sheets, which most people don’t, you have to sort of just read it again and again, and then all of a sudden, “Ah, now I get. It’s a ripoff! It’s created out of nothing. Now I get it.”

BEN NORTON: It’s just a house of cards. To me it proves the kind — there used to be this kind of very blunt orthodox Marxist view that the economy strictly follows politics, and it seems to me this is a case where the economy is just created by politics.

MICHAEL HUDSON: That’s true, and that’s not an un-Marxist position. Marx did distinguish between oligarchies and democracies, and finance capitalist economies and industrial capitalist economies.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Right. And the $17 billion for “urgent national security measures” was straight into the pockets of Boeing, which had its 737 maxes falling out of the sky, and had been clamoring for this bailout for a long time.

I mean you saw 3M, the maker of these masks which are suddenly unavailable, gained a total exemption from lawsuits, if the masks that it mass-produced now somehow failed.

So all of these things stuffed into the bailout were what industry and finance had been clamoring for for years. And they finally had the opportunity to do it.

(Outro – 40:38)

BEN NORTON: All right, we’re gonna take a pause there. That was the end of part one of our interview here with the economist Michael Hudson. He is a Wall Street financial analyst, a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri Kansas City, and of course the author of many books on economics.

You can find some of his work at michael-hudson.com. We will link to that in the show notes. He has interviews with transcripts and articles.

You can also find some of his economics work and the work of some of his like-minded colleagues at the economics department at the University of Missouri Kansas City website. I will link to that as well in the show notes. You can find the show notes at moderaterebels.com.

In part two of this episode, we’re going to continue our discussion of the house of cards that is the international financial system, the economic system. And in the second part we’re going to talk about his book “Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire.”

This is an incredible book. You know here at Moderate Rebels, Max and I frequently talk about the political and military side of imperialism. Michael Hudson just spells out, in easy-to-understand terms, how imperialism works at an economic level, how the US government and the Treasury, through the backing of military force, force countries around the world to buy US bonds, Treasury bonds, and how there’s basically just a con scheme where countries pay for their own US military occupation through buying US Treasury bonds.

Michael Hudson explains that all in really simple terms. And we also talk about the rise of China, and how China does pose a so-called threat, in scare quotes, to not the American people but rather to the hegemony of the US financial system — and the main financial instruments, the weapons that the US uses to maintain that hegemony, the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, and the World Bank.

And Hudson describes how, in his terms, the IMF, and the World Bank, specifically, are some of the most evil institutions that are really maintaining the American dictatorial, authoritarian chokehold on the global financial system.

*

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Economist Michael Hudson explains how American imperialism has created a global free lunch, where the US makes foreign countries pay for its wars, and even their own military occupation.

Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton discuss the economics of Washington’s empire, the role of the IMF and World Bank, attempts to create alternative financial systems like BRICS, and the new cold war on China and Russia.

Full transcript follows.

***

MICHAEL HUDSON: The World Bank has one primary aim, and that’s to make other countries dependent on American agriculture. This is built into its articles of agreement. It can only make foreign currency loans, so it will only make loans to countries for agricultural development, roads, if it is to promote exports.

So the United States, through the World Bank, has become I think the most dangerous, right-wing, evil organization in modern in history — more evil than the IMF. That’s why it’s almost always been run by a secretary of defense. It has always been explicitly military. It’s the hard fist of American imperialism.

Its idea is that, we’ll make Latin American, and African, and Asian countries export plantation crops , especially plantations that are foreign owned. But the primary directive of the World Bank to countries is: “You must not feed yourself; you must not grow your own grain or your own food; you must depend on the United States for that. And you can pay for that by exporting plantation crops.”

(Intro – 1:45)

BEN NORTON: Here at Moderate Rebels we talk a lot about imperialism. I mean it’s really the kind of main point of this show. This program explores how US imperialism functions, how it works on the global stage, how neoliberal policies of austerity and privatization are forced at the barrel of a gun through the US military, through invasion and plunder.

We talk about it in Venezuela, and Iraq, and Syria, and so many countries. But we often don’t talk about the specific economic dynamics of how it works through banks, and loans, and bonds.

Well today we are continuing our discussion with the economist Michael Hudson, who is really one of the best experts in the world when it comes to understanding how US imperialism functions as an economic system, not just through a system of military force.

Of course the economics are maintained, are undergirded, by that military force. And we talk about how the military force is expressed through regime-change wars and military interventions.

But Michael Hudson also explains how the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and the US financial system, and banks and Wall Street, they all work together, hand in glove with the military, to maintain that financial chokehold.

He spells this all out brilliantly in a book called “Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire.” He originally wrote that book back in 1968, and then recently updated it in 2002, published again in 2003 with the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, and kind of updated and showed how, even though the system that he detailed 50 years ago hasn’t really changed, but it has shifted in some ways.

So today we’re gonna talk about how that international imperialist system dominated by the US works.

Michael Hudson, who in the first part of this talked about the scheme that is the coronavirus bailout — if you want to watch the first part you can go find that at moderaterebels.com; it’s on YouTube, Spotify, iTunes, any other platform.

Michael Hudson is an economist and he’s also a longtime Wall Street financial analyst. He is also a professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and you can find his work at michael-hudson.com, which I will link to in the show notes for this episode.

So without further ado, here is the second part of our interview with Michael Hudson.

(4:37)

MAX BLUMENTHAL: I think it’s a good transition point to talk about another kind of scam you’ve identified. There’s a really hilarious aside in the second preface to your book “Super Imperialism,” where Herman Kahn, who is, I think he was a founder of the Hudson Institute, which you went to work for, he was also the inspiration for the Dr. Strangelove character and Stanley Kubrick’s film.

Herman Kahn is, there’s an award that the neocons give out every year named for him; Benjamin Netanyahu is a recent award winner.

But he was he was in the audience, or on a panel for one of your talks, where you laid out your theory of “Super Imperialism,” and how the United States actually gets other countries to subsidize its empire, and is able to expand and carry out this massive imperial project without having to impose austerity on its own population, as other countries have to do under IMF control.

So Herman Kahn comes up to you after the talk and says, “You actually identified the rip-off perfectly.” And your book starts selling like hotcakes in DC, I guess among people who work for the CIA, and people who work in the military-intelligence apparatus.

MICHAEL HUDSON: What he said was, “We’ve pulled off the greatest ripoff in history. We’ve gone way beyond anything that British Empire ever thought of.” He said, “That’s a success story. Most people think imperialism is bad; you’ve shown how it’s the greatest success story — we get a free lunch forever!”

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Right. So explain the ripoff you identified there, and how it is being perpetuated under the Trump administration in ways that I think are pretty amazing, including through the imposition of unprecedented sanctions on something like one-third of the world’s population.

(6:40)

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well I wrote “Super Imperialism” in 1972, and it was published exactly one month after President Nixon took America off gold in August of 1971. And the reason he took America off gold was the entire balance of payments deficit from the Korean War to the Vietnam War was military in character.

And every time, especially in the ’60s, the more money that America would spend in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, all this money had to be spent locally. And the banks were all French banks, because it was French Indochina, all the money would be sent to Paris, to the banks’ head offices, turned over from dollars into francs, and General de Gaulle would end up with all these dollars, and he would, every month, send in the dollars and want payment in gold. And Germany would do the same thing.

And so the more America fought militarily, it was depleting its own gold stock, until finally, in August 1971, it said, “We’ve been using gold as the key to our world power ever since World War I, when we put Europe on rations. So we’re going to stop paying gold.”

They closed the gold window. And most of the economists were all saying, “Oh my heavens, now it’s going to be a depression. “But what I said was, “Wait a minute, now that other countries can no longer get gold from all this military spending” — and when you talked about the balance of payments deficit, it’s not the trade deficit, it’s not foreign investment; it’s almost entirely military in character.

So all these this money that spent abroad, how are we ever going to get it back? Well these dollars we have spent around the world, mainly for the 800 military bases and the other activities we have, these dollars would end up in foreign central banks.

And foreign central banks, what are they going to do with them? Well we wouldn’t let foreign central banks buy American industries. We would let them buy stocks, but not a majority owner.

My former boss, the man who taught me all about the oil industry, in Standard Oil, who became undersecretary of the Treasury for international affairs, and when Herman Kahn and I went to the White House, he said, “We’ve told the Saudi Arabians that they can charge whatever they want for their oil, but all the money they get, they have to recycle to the United States. Mostly they can buy Treasury bonds, so that we’ll have the money to keep on spending, but they can also buy stocks, or they can do with the Japanese did and buy junk real estate and lose their shirts.”

So basically, when America spends money abroad, central banks really don’t have much — they don’t speculate. They don’t buy companies; they buy Treasury bonds. So we run a monetary deficit; the dollars are spent abroad; the central banks lend them back to the Treasury; and that finances the budget deficit, but it also finances the balance of payments deficit. So we just keep giving paper

And I think President Bush, George W. Bush, said, “Well we’re never really going to repay this. They get counters, but we’re not going to repay it.” And then, as a matter of fact, you have Tom Cotton a senator from [Arkansas] saying, “Well you know China holds savings of $2 trillion or so in US Treasury bonds. Why don’t we just not pay them? They gave us the virus; let just grab it and nullify it.”

We can nullify Iranian assets, Venezuelan assets — it’s like a bank can just wipe out other deposits you have, if it wants militarily. So the United States doesn’t have any constraint on military spending.

Now Herman Kahn and I on another occasion went to the Treasury Department, and we talked about what the world would look like on a gold standard. And I said, “Well gold is a peaceful metal. If you have to pay in gold, no country with a gold standard can afford to go to war anymore. Because a war would be entail a foreign exchange payment, and you’d have to pay this foreign exchange in gold, not IOUs, and you would end up going broke pretty quickly.”

Well needless to say, I think someone from the Defense Department said, “That’s why we’re not going to do it.”

Here’s an example: Let’s suppose that you went to a grocery store. You decided, ok, you go to the grocery store and you buy — you sign an IOU for everything that you buy. You go to a liquor store, IOU. You buy a car, IOU.

You get everything you want just for an IOU, and people try to collect the IOUs, and you say, “Well you know that IOU isn’t for collecting from me. Trade it among yourselves. Trade it among yourselves and you’ll get rich in no time. But treat it as an asset, just as you treat a dollar bill.”

Well you’d get a free ride. You’d be allowed to go and write IOUs for everything, and nobody could ever collect. That’s what the United States position is, and that’s what it wants to keep.

And that’s why China, Russia, and other countries are trying to de-dollarize, trying to get rid of the dollar, and are buying gold so that they can settle payments deficits among themselves in their own currency, or currencies of friendly countries, but just avoid the dollars altogether.

(12:21)

BEN NORTON: Michael, in the first part of this interview, when we were talking about the coronavirus bailout and the $6 trillion that were just basically given to Wall Street, you mentioned that basically it is just — I mean, I also said it — that’s it’s just a con scheme. But you said, really, that a lot of people are surprised, that they don’t think the system can work this way, because it just seems so blatantly stacked against them, so blatantly unfair.

In your book — “Super Imperialism” is just so mind-blowing because, in simplistic terms to someone who is definitely a non-expert like me, it just becomes so clear that, as you put it, the US for decades, since the end of World War Two, has been really obtaining “the largest free lunch ever achieved in history,” the way you put it.

I’m gonna read just two paragraphs here really quickly from your book, and then maybe ask you to unpack exactly how this works. But right at the beginning — and this is the updated version of your book, and we’ll link to your book in the show notes for this show. So anyone, I would highly recommend anyone listening could go buy “Super Imperialism.”

I’m going to be republishing it through my own institute. It’s very hard to get the book; that’s why I’m buying the rights back. Because it’s really not marketed in this country very much. So at any rate it’s on my website, and you don’t have to buy the book; you can go to my website and get many of the chapters.

Excellent, well I’m gonna link to your website in the show notes that’s michael-hudson.com. And thank you for putting that up, because I’ve been reading the PDF, and it’s incredible.

So you write in the the introduction to the new updated version, which you wrote in 2002, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, you wrote:

“The Treasury bonds standard of international finance has enabled the United States to obtain the largest free lunch ever achieved in history. America has turned the international financial system upside down, whereas formerly it rested on gold, central bank reserves are now held in the form of US government IOUs, that can be run up without limit.

“In effect America has been buying up Europe, Asia, and other regions with paper credit, US Treasury IOUs that it has informed the world it has little intention of ever paying off.

“And there is little Europe or Asia can do about it except to abandon the dollar and create their own financial system.”

So this seems to me as an outsider to be totally insane, to be a total con scheme. Can you explain how that scheme works, and especially in light of neoliberal economics?

I took, just in college, basic introductory economics classes that were mandatory, especially microeconomics, and in those classes they teach you this neoliberal, libertarian form of economics, and they teach you the famous Winston Churchill quote, “There is no such thing in economics as a free lunch.” But you’re pointing out that actually, on the international stage, this whole thing is just all a giant free lunch for the US empire.

(15:53)

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well the whole financial economy is a free lunch, and if you’re going to get a free lunch, then you protect yourself by saying there is no such thing as a free lunch. Obviously it does not want to make itself visible; it wants to make itself as invisible as possible.

Well most of these countries in Asia get the dollars from US military spending. They say, “What are we going to do with the dollars?” They buy US Treasury bonds, that finance the military spending on the military bases that encircle them. So they’re financing their own military encirclement!

It’s a circular flow. The United States spends dollars in these countries; the local recipients turn them over for local currency; the local currency recipients, the food sellers and the manufacturers, turn the dollars over to the banks for domestic currency, which is how they operate; and the dollars are sent back to the United States; and it’s a circular flow that is basically military in character.

And the gunboats don’t appear in your economics textbooks. I bet your price theory didn’t have gun boats in them, or the crime sector, and probably they didn’t have debt in it either.

So if you have economics talking as if the whole economy is workers spending their wages on goods and services; government doesn’t play a role except to interfere, but government is 40 percent of GDP, mainly military in character, then obviously economics doesn’t really talk about what you think of the economy; it doesn’t talk about society.

It talks about a very narrow segment that it isolates, as if we’re talking about a small organ in the body, without seeing the body as a whole economic system, a whole interrelated system that is dominated and controlled by the finance and real estate sector, which has gained control of the government.

And if the finance, and the insurance, and military sector, military-industrial complex, make themselves invisible and absent from the textbook, then people are just not going to look there to say, “How did that affect our life? How does that affect the economy?” And they’re not going to see that that’s what’s making the economy poor and pushing it into depression.

(18:11)

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well I can’t give out IOUs on everything, on my own debts, because when the debt collector comes, I don’t have gunboats; I don’t have machine guns; I don’t have any gun.

I mean if I wanted to get a gun I couldn’t get one, because they’re all bought up in Virginia, across the river, because you know everyone’s panicking. And I’m sure they’re defending themselves by like having their guns accidentally go off and shoot their dogs.

But that’s kind of what’s missing as well from this theory is that, if people try to collect their debt on the US, the US can do severe damage to them, militarily or otherwise.

Let’s game this out. I mean how do you see this playing out in Venezuela, where the Venezuelan government has tried to go around US sanctions, has tried to to work with Russia and China to sell gold; it’s had something like $5 billion of assets stolen by the US through sheer piracy in the past year.

And now the US has dispatched I think more naval ships than we’ve seen in Latin America or in South America at any time in the last 30 years.

(19:27)

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well that’s the other part of the “Super Imperialism” book: debt bondage. Venezuela had a US-installed dictator, a right-winger, some years ago, and changed the law in Venezuela so that Venezuela’s foreign debt, sovereign debt, when it borrows in dollars, is backed by the collateral of its oil reserves. And it has the largest oil reserves in South America.

So the United States wants to grab the oil reserves. Just as Vice President Cheney said we’re going into Iraq and Syria to grab the oil, America would like all these oil reserves in Venezuela.

How does it get the oil reserves? Well it doesn’t have to technically invade, or at least finance is the new mode of warfare.

It tried to grab these reserves by saying, “Let’s block Venezuela from earning the money by exporting the oil and earning the money from its US investments to pay the foreign debt. So we’re just going to grab the investment, and we’re going to select a mini dictator; we’re going to give it to Mr. Guaidó, and say, “This doesn’t belong to Venezuela; we’re arbitrarily taking it away and we’re giving the oil distribution assets in North America to Guaidó.”

“We’re going to block Venezuela from paying the debt, and that means it’ll default on a foreign debt, and so the vulture funds and the bondholders can now grab Venezuelan oil, anywhere, under international law, because it is pledged as collateral for its debt, just as if you’d borrowed a mortgage debt and you’d pledged your home and the creditor could take away your home” — like Obama had so many people lose their home.

Well now they’re trying to force Venezuela into relinquishing its debt, but Venezuela still is managing to scrape by. And so they may need a military force out to invade Venezuela, like Bush invaded Panama or Grenada.

It’s an oil grab. So what finance couldn’t achieve, finally you really do need the military fist.

Finance is basically backed by military, and domestically by force, by the sheriff, by the police department. It’s the force that are going to kick you out of the house.

So the question is, is the only defense by the indebted people in America, your Virginia defense? Does there have to be an armed revolution here to cancel the debts? Do they have to eat the rich? That’s the whole question for the politics of America.

I don’t see it being solved. If it is not solved by the indebted people simply starving to death, committing suicide, getting sick, or emigrating, then there will have to be a revolution. Those are the choices in Americ.

And Venezuela said, “We’re not going to starve quietly in the dark.” And so there’s a military buildup pretending that it’s all about drugs, when Venezuela is threatening to interrupt the CIA’s drug trade. I mean that’s the irony of this! It’s the CIA that’s the drug dealer, not the Venezuelan government.

So we’re in the Orwellian world that works through the organs or the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC, National Public Radio, the real right-wing of America.

(23:00)

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, I’m so glad you boiled it down like that. Because so much of what we do at The Grayzone is to punch holes in the propaganda constructs that are used to basically provide liberal cover for what is sheer gangsterism.

MICHAEL HUDSON: It’s much more black and white than gray.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah well, we should call it The Black and White Zone.

We’re seeing it as well in Syria, where we’ve had one kind of human rights propaganda construct after another. And now at the end of the line, as the whole proxy war ends, Trump says, “We have to keep the troops there because of oil. We need them to guard the oil fields.”

So it all becomes clear. But it’s unclear to everyone who’s been confused for the past years, following the way that the war has been marketed to them through these corporate media and US government publications that you just named. It’s just, we’re there for the oil.

BEN NORTON: Michael, I mean there are so many ways we could explore this topic further, and hopefully we can have you back more often in the future, because we definitely need more economics coverage. We frequently talk about the political side of a lot of these issues of US imperialism, but of course the economic element is absolutely integral to understand what’s happening.

I’m also very interested, you mentioned before we started this interview, that your book “Super Imperialism” is very popular in China, and that even in schools there people are reading it.

And the question of China I think is the central question of this century — the rise of China, the so-called “threat” that China poses, in scare quotes, to the US. Of course China doesn’t threaten the American people, but rather the chokehold that the US has on the international financial system.

And we have seen under Trump — I mean it’s been happening for years; it really actually began under Obama with the “Pivot to Asia,” and that was really Hillary Clinton’s State Department strategy was to move toward the encirclement of China.

But now under Trump it has really become the main foreign policy bogeyman of the Trump White House. And especially now with coronavirus, every single day the corporate media is full of non-stop anti-china propaganda — “China is the evil totalitarian regime that’s going to take over the world, and we have to unite with the Republicans in order to fight against China.”

And we now even see figures openly defending the “new cold war,” as they call it. They say we’re in a new Cold War, as the right-wing historian from Harvard Niall Ferguson put it in the New York Times recently.

So I’m wondering, your book I think is even more relevant now than it was when you first wrote it, it’s so, so relevant. But what about the question of China? And what about the question of this new cold war?

Do you think that could challenge the US-dominated financial system that was created after World War II, using the weapons of the World Bank and the IMF, as you spell out? Are we heading maybe toward the creation of a new international financial system?

(26:24)

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well what makes China so threatening is that it’s following the exact, identical policies that made America rich in the 19th century. It’s a mixed economy.

Its government is providing the basic infrastructure and subsidized prices to lower the cost of living and the cost of doing business, so that its export industry can make money. And it’s subsidizing research and development, just like the United States did in the 19th century and early 20th century.

So America basically says to the rest of the world, “Do as we say, not as we do, and not as we’ve done.”

So China has a mixed economy that is working very well. You can just see the changes occurring there. And it realizes that the United States is trying to disable it, that that the United States wants to control all the sectors of production that have monopoly pricing — information technology, microchip technology, 5G communications, military spending.

And the United States wants to be able to essentially buy goods from the rest of the world with overpriced exports, American movies, anything that has a patent that yields a monopoly price. And China wants to become — it has decided that.

America, in the 1950s tried to fight China by sanctioning grain exports to China. You mentioned sanctions earlier, the first sanctions were used against China, to prevent them, trying to starve them with grain.

Canada broke that embargo for grain, and China was very friendly to Canada, until Canada turned out to be — the prime minister, now that he has moved into a small basement in the Pentagon, and has agreed to grab Chinese officials. It’s right there in Washington; Canada is right there in Washington in one of the basements. It’s not a country anymore. So China does not feel so friendly towards Canada now that it’s moved.

But it realized, we can’t depend on America for anything. It can cut us off with sanctions like it has tried to do with Iran, with Venezuela, with Cuba.

So the idea of China, Russia, and the countries in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization has been: “We have to be independent within ourselves, and make a Eurasian trading area, and we will take off because we are successful industrial capitalism, evolving into socialism, into a mixed economy, with the government handling all of the monopoly sectors to prevent monopoly pricing here.”

“And we don’t want American banks to come in, create paper dollars, and buy out all of our industries. We’re not going to let America do that.”

(29:29)

I have gone back to China very often. And I’m a professor at Peking University; I have honorary professorships in Wuhan. I probably lecture mainly in Tianjin. There are a number of articles on my website from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences on de-dollarization, essentially how China can avoid the use of the dollar by becoming independent in agriculture, and technology, and other goods.

And the threat of China is that it will not be a victim. Victimizers always look at the victims as vicious attackers of themselves. So America says China is a vicious threat because it’s not letting us exploit them and victimize them.

So again, it’s an Orwellian rhetoric of the bully. The bully always believes that the person he’s attacking is a threat. Just like in Germany, Goebbels said that their surefire way to mobilize the population behind any attack is to say, “We’re defending ourselves against foreign attack.”

So you have the American attack on China pretending to be defense against their wanting to be just as independent as the United States always has been. The United States doesn’t want any other country to have any leverage to use over the United States. The United States insists on veto power in any organization that it’ll join — the World Bank, the IMF, the United Nations.

And China essentially says, ok, this is the very definition of national independence, to be independent from other countries available to choke us, offering a choke point, whether it’s a grain that we need; or technology; or the bank clearing system, the SWIFT interbank clearing system, to make our financial system operate; or the internet system.

So by essentially waging this economic warfare against China to protect America monopolies, America is integrating China and Russia. And probably the leading Chinese nationalist in the world, the leading Russian nationalist, is Donald Trump.

He’s saying, “Look boys, I know that you’re influenced by American neoliberals. I’m gonna help you. I believe that you should be independent. I’m gonna help you, Chinese, and Russians, and Iranians, be independent. I’m going to keep pushing the sanctions on agriculture, to make sure that you’re able to feed yourself. I’m gonna be pushing sanctions on technology, to make sure that you can defend yourself.”

So he obviously is, I believe he’s a Chinese and Russian agent, just like MSNBC says.

(32:09)

BEN NORTON: Yeah and Michael, this actually reminds me, I used to follow you regularly at The Real News, and I worked there for a bit, and unfortunately there was kind an internal coup there, and it has moved to the right a bit.

But the point is, a few years ago at The Real News, I remember you did an amazing debate between you and the Canadian economist Leo Panitch, and it was about the nature of the BRICS system.

This was when this is before the series of coups that that overthrew the left in Brazil and installed the fascist government now of Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing extremist. And at the time there was Dilma Rousseff, a progressive from the Workers’ Party.

And Brazil and Russia were helping to take the lead in the BRICS system. This is Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.

And of course the coups, the series of coups in Brazil, kind of ended that project of South-South regional integration. And also the rise of the right-wing, the far-right, in India with Narendra Modi.

But there was a moment there when the BRICS community, these countries were trying to build their own bank. China of course has a series of banks. You mentioned the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

So there have been these international institutions, multilateral institutions, created to kind of challenge the hegemony of the World Bank and the IMF.

And I remember in that debate, Leo Panitch was arguing that, “Oh the BRIC system and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, all of these institutions are just going to be the new form of neoliberalism, and they’re just going to replace the World Bank and implement many of the same policies.” You disagreed with that.

So maybe can you kind of relitigate that debate here a little bit and just kind of articulate your position for our viewers?

(34:08)

MICHAEL HUDSON: The World Bank has one primary aim, and that’s to make other countries dependent on American agriculture. This is built into its articles of agreement. It can only make foreign currency loans, so it will only make loans to countries for agricultural development, roads, if it is to promote exports.

So the United States, through the World Bank, has become I think the most dangerous, right-wing, evil organization in modern in history — more evil than the IMF. That’s why it’s almost always been run by a secretary of defense. It has always been explicitly military. It’s the hard fist of American imperialism.

Its idea is that, we’ll make Latin American, and African, and Asian countries export plantation crops , especially plantations that are foreign owned. But the primary directive of the World Bank to countries is: “You must not feed yourself; you must not grow your own grain or your own food; you must depend on the United States for that. And you can pay for that by exporting plantation crops that can’t be grown in temperate zones like the United States.”

So China and Russia, they’re not really agricultural economies. The buttress of America’s trade balance has been agriculture, not industry. Obviously, we de-industrialized. Agriculture, since World War II, has been the foundation of the trade balance.

And you need foreign dependency. The purpose of the World Bank is to make other countries’ economies distorted and warped into a degree that they are dependent on the United States for their trade patterns.

BEN NORTON: Well Michal, isn’t it also true though that China has massive agricultural production, and Russia produces a lot of wheat right?

(36:14)

MICHAEL HUDSON: Sure, but it does it doesn’t have to base its exports on agriculture to African countries. It can afford having African countries growing their own food supply so that they won’t have to buy American food; they can grow their own food.

Imagine, if China helps other countries grow their own food and grain, then America’s trade surplus evaporates. Because that’s the only advantage that America has, agribusiness.

BEN NORTON: Yeah it’s like that famous quote: If you give a man a fish, he’ll eat for one day; if you teach a man to fish, he’ll eat for the rest of his life. And then I think Marx, didn’t Marx complicate that?

MICHAEL HUDSON: But if you lend them the money to buy a fish, then he ends up bankrupt and you get to grab up all his property.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah I mean we saw this play out clearly in Haiti.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Yeah, that’s the typical — what America has when it has a free a reign, that’s exactly the Haiti story. That’s absolutely terrible. It’s depressing to read.

I get cognitive dissonance, because it’s just so unfair. It’s so awful to read; I avert the page.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah I mean just observing all of this is what kind of brought me to the point where I concluded that there had to be another international financial system, when I saw how Haiti was brought to its knees.

First with the School of the Americas graduates staging a coup, and Bill Clinton reinstalls Jean-Bertrand Aristide. And so it all it takes place under the guise of goodwill by Washington.

But Aristide is forced to sign off, basically sign away Haiti’s domestic agricultural production capacity. And the next thing you know, their rice economy’s wiped out, and they’re importing rice from Louisiana.

And the only economy left, the only economic opportunity left, is to work in these free trade zones for US companies.

And that’s just the model writ large. It kind of helped lead to the next coup, that removed Aristide, and look where Haiti is today.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Right, it means, you must not protect your own economy; only America can protect its own economy. But you must not. That’s free trade.

(38:45)

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Right, going back to the JFK Seeds of Peace program. It’s big agro subsidies, and then you bomb the Third World with cheap seeds and cheap goods, and then you have a migration crisis.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Seeds for Starvation is what the program is known as. Because by giving a low price of foreign aid to these countries, they they prevented domestic agricultural development, because no farmer could compete with free crops that America was giving.

The purpose of the Seeds for Starvation program was to prevent countries from feeding themselves, and to make them dependent.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, when I lived in LA I would meet families who had initially come across the border because of the program — they would point the finger directly at Seeds for Starvation. They’d say, “We came from rural Mexico, and our livelihood was wiped out.”

So this is a long-standing program. And we’ve seen in the coronavirus bailout five times more money provided to USAID for so-called stabilization programs than for hospital workers.

And that’s to do exactly what you just described: USAID is sort of the spearhead of these programs which aim to wipe out land reform programs, and replace them with US aid in the form of these cheap seeds and so on, cheap bananas to Burundi, and everywhere else.

So do you see, through your experience in China, that Belt and Road is a genuine alternative to this model?

(40:27)

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well they’re certainly trying to make it. By the way, what you’ve just described, it’s not a bug; it’s a feature.

When you have the same problem occurring after 50 years, it’s either insanity — and we know it’s not — or it’s the intent.

You have to assume at a certain point that the results of these aid programs are the intended results. And certainly if you look at the congressional testimony, Congress knows this, but the media don’t pick it up.

In China, they’re really trying to create an alternative. They want to break free from the United States. And if Trump’s policies of “America First” continue, and as he said, “We have to win every deal.” That means, any deal we make with the foreign country, that country has to lose.

So he’s integrating the whole world, and isolating the United States. And when you isolate the United States, China realizes that what will be isolated is the neoliberal philosophy that is the cover story, the junk economics that justifies all of these destructive policies.

BEN NORTON: Well Michael, this was I think one of our most interesting episodes. We want to more economics coverage, so hopefully we can talk more with you and get some more of your analysis.

I guess just concluding here, my final question would be, I mentioned that the term cold war has been thrown around a lot. And of course, the new cold war is going to be different from the old cold war in a lot of different ways.

And of course Russia is not the Soviet Union at all. Russia does not have a socialist system. China’s system as you mentioned is mixed, there are still socialist elements, but even China’s economy is not nearly as state controlled as the Soviet Union was at the peak of the cold war.

So I’m wondering, it’s pretty clear if you listen to the rhetoric coming from the Pentagon, that “great power competition” as they refer to it is now the the undergirding philosophy of US foreign policy. What is the economics of that?

Because the economics of neoliberalism, after the destruction of the Socialist Bloc, and George H. W. Bush’s declaration of a “new world order,” which is of course just neoliberalism and US hegemony — in that period, the clear economic philosophy, the kind of guiding foreign policy, was destruction of independent socialist-oriented states and forcible integration of those countries into the international neoliberal economy.

We saw that with Iraq; we saw that with former Yugoslavia; we saw that with Libya — which is really just a failed state.

So now I think we’re in a kind of new phase. The Pentagon released two years ago its national defense security strategy saying that the new goal of the Pentagon and US foreign policy is to contain China and Russia. That is the stated, professed goal.

What does that look like economically going forward?

(43:31)

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well I think that’s quite right. Of course it’ll contain Russia and China, and there’s nothing that Russia and China want more than to be contained.

In other words, that they’re talking about is decoupling from the US economy. And the US will say, “Well we’re not going to let them have access to the US market, and we’re not going to have anything to do with them.” And Russia and China say, “Boy that’s wonderful, ok we’re on the same wavelength there. You can contain us; we will contain you. You go your way; we’ll go our way.”

So basically the cold war was an attempt — it’s neoliberalism and privatization. It’s Thatcherism. It’s, “How do we make China and Russia look like Margaret Thatcher’s England, or Russia in the 1990s under Yeltsin?”

“How do we prevent other countries from protecting their industry and their financial system from the United States financial system and US exports? How do we prevent other countries from doing for themselves what America does for itself? How do we make a double standard in world finance, and world trade, and world politics?”

And the result of trying to prevent other countries from doing this is simply to speed the parting guest, to accelerate their understanding that, they have to make a break; they have to be contained.

In other words, they have to create their own food supply, not rely on American food exports. They have to create their own 5G system, not let America’s 5G, with its spy portals all built in. And they have to create their own society, and go their own way.

Which is what China was like before the 16th century. It was always the “Central Kingdom”; it always looked at itself as being central and independent from the rest of the world. And it’s going back to that. Except it realizes that it needs raw materials from Africa and other countries.

And the question is, what is Europe going to do? Is Europe going to just follow the Thatcher right deflationary Eurozone policies and end up looking like Greece? Or is it going to join with Eurasia, with Russia and China, and make a whole Asiatic continent?

The cold war really is about what is going to happen to Europe. Because we have already isolated China and Russia and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

The question is what will happen to Europe, and what will happen to Africa.

(Outro – 46:04)

BEN NORTON: Great, well I think that’s the perfect note to end on. We were speaking with the economist Michael Hudson. He is a Wall Street financial analyst and a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri – Kansas City.

He’s also the author of many books, and we were talking about “Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire.” He has two versions of that, and we will link to that book in the show notes of this episode.

We will also link to his website, where you can find a lot of great interviews with transcripts, his articles — and that’s michael-hudson.com.

Michael, thanks a lot. That was a really great, two-part interview. I learned a lot, and I think our viewers will benefit a lot.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah thanks a lot Michael.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Thank you. I hope we can fill out all the details in subsequent broadcasts.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Absolutely.

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Featured image is from Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom

While Russiagate still simmers, Chinagate is coming to a boil — both highly politicized, nothing credible supporting them.

No evidence in modern memory suggests US election meddling by other countries.

If attempted, they’d accomplish nothing because of the US political system — a one-party state with two right wings.

On issues mattering most, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between them, just the illusion of different agendas.

Both are hostile to democratic governance the way it should be.

They notably oppose world peace, stability, social justice, and the rule of law.

They’re hostile to virtually everything just societies hold dear — exploiting ordinary people at home and abroad to benefit privileged ones.

Trump is a congenital liar, why nothing he says should be taken at face value.

On Wednesday, he falsely accused China of “do(ing) anything they can” to help Joe Biden defeat him in November.

China bashing by him, hardliners surrounding him, and GOP congressional members are all about trying to falsely shift blame for failed Trump regime policies in dealing with COVID-19 and economic collapse onto Beijing.

China’s Foreign Ministrry spokesman Geng Shaung denounced the US blame game, saying the following:

“They have only one objective: to shirk their responsibility for their own poor epidemic prevention and control measures and divert public attention.”

He debunked phony claims about Chinese US election interference, saying:

“The US presidential election is an internal affair. We have no interest in interfering in it.”

“We hope the people of the US will not drag China into its election politics.”

Political scientist Huang Jing explained that Trump’s blame game aims to further his reelection prospects.

He advised Beijing to “stay calm and avoid overreacting while trying to prevent (US moves for unacceptable COVID-19 reparations) from developing into a global trend.”

Separately, Chinese broadcaster CCTV blasted neocon hardliner Mike Pompeo, saying:

He “has shown no professionalism or responsibility whatsoever,” adding:

“Instead, he spreads a political virus of estrangement through falsehoods.”

“He has turned himself into an obstacle, setting back all humanity. One could say, he is an accomplice to the coronavirus.”

Interviewed by NBC News on Tuesday, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng said “at this critical and trying moment, China and the US (should) put aside…differences…to confront our common enemy, the virus,” adding:

“(S)ome (US officials) have gravely politicized the COVID-19 issue.”

“China has been open, transparent and responsible in its COVID-19 response.”

“We did not cover up anything, and did not delay any efforts.”

“We have already publicized the time line of how we have shared the information on COVID-19.”

“Chinese government officials, the general public, and individual citizens are outraged as some US political figures are using COVID-19 to slander China” with their own aims and ambitions in mind.

“(A) Republican campaign memo goes so far as to advise the candidates to address COVID-19 issues by directly attacking China.”

“Such flagrant moves have taken political manipulation to a level beyond anyone’s imagination.”

The blame game is longstanding US policy, falsely accusing other nations and their leadership for its own high crimes and other hostile actions.

The Trump regime’s National Security Strategy called China a “strategic competitor.”

Both wings of the US war party treat all sovereign independent nations as strategic enemies, especially China, Russia and Iran.

On the concocted issue of demanding reparations from China for spreading COVID-19 infections, Le Yucheng called the scheme “a preposterous political farce,” adding:

“It has no legal basis. These is no international law that supports blaming a country simply for being the first to report a disease. Neither does history offer any such precedent.”

It’s “blackmail,” what Beijing categorically rejects.

On Tuesday, Geng Shaung accused US politicians of “lying through their teeth” about China, while covering up their own failures.

That goes for Trump, hardliners surrounding him, and anti-China congressional members.

Geng: “We advise American politicians to reflect on their own problems and try their best to control the epidemic as soon as possible, instead of continuing to play tricks to deflect blame.”

Missouri’s lawsuit against China for damages is “absurd…(N)o factual or legal basis” supports it.

Is COVID-19 and its economic fallout a diabolical US scheme to demonize, isolate, and weaken China politically and economically.

It has clear earmarks of this objective, along with arranging a transfer of enormous wealth to US monied interests at the expense of public health and welfare, and the further erosion of fundamental rights and social justice.

Time and again, things aren’t as they seem. What’s going on may not be natural as widely reported.

It may be a diabolical US plot aimed at achieving the above objectives — a second 9/11.

The fullness of time will explain when more about what’s going on and what’s behind it is known.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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Seniors, Prisoners and the Plight of the Detroit Majority

By Abayomi Azikiwe, April 30, 2020

During the early weeks of April the state of Michigan was ranking third in the number of deaths and the city of Detroit held the undesirable position of having the highest mortality rates above any other region in the United States.

By the conclusion of the month, it appears as if the shelter-in-place and other emergency declarations issued by Governor Gretchen Whitmer have had an effect on curbing transmissions. Many more people are wearing masks and engaging in social distancing on the streets and in businesses declared essential which remain open.

Giulietto Chiesa: Lets Free Ourselves from the Virus of War

By Comitato No Nato, April 29, 2020

We remember the last words pronounced by Giulietto Chiesa at the conclusion of the Conference of April 25th, at the end of the political commitment of his whole life. Truthful, crude words about the gravity of the crisis we are living in. Words that call to the struggle to regain constitutional freedoms.

Welcome to the Era of the Great Disillusionment

By Jonathan Cook, April 29, 2020

Let me preface my argument by making clear I do not intend to express any view about the truth or falsity of any of these debates – not even the one about reptile rulers. My refusal to publicly take a position should not be interpreted as my implicit endorsement of any of these viewpoints because, after all, only a crazy tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorist sympathiser would refuse to make their views known on such matters.

Equally, my lumping together of all these disparate issues does not necessarily mean I see them as alike. They are presented in mainstream thinking as similarly proof of an unhinged, delusional, conspiracy-oriented mindset. I am working within a category that has been selected for me.

The Dubious COVID Models, The Tests and Now the Consequences

By F. William Engdahl, April 29, 2020

Two major models are being used in the West since the alleged spread of coronavirus to Europe and USA to “predict” and respond to the spread of COVID-19 illness. One was developed at Imperial College of London. The second was developed, with emphasis on USA effects, by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Seattle, near the home of Microsoft founder Bill Gates. What few know is that both groups owe their existence to generous funding by a tax exempt foundation that stands to make literally billions on purported vaccines and other drugs to treat coronavirus—The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

How to Think Post-Planet Lockdown

By Pepe Escobar, April 29, 2020

What we already know for sure, as Shoshana Zuboff detailed in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, is that “industrial capitalism followed its own logic of shock and awe” to conquer nature. But now  surveillance capitalism “has human nature in its sights.”

In The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene, analyzing the explosion in population growth, increasing energy consumption  and a tsunami of information “driven by the positive feedback loops of reinvestment and profit,” Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin of University College, London, suggest that our current mode of living is the “least probable” among several options. “A collapse or a switch to a new mode of living is more likely.”

Will China Replace Islam as the West’s New Enemy?

By Peter Oborne, April 29, 2020

Huntington was writing after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the end of the Cold War between Soviet Russia and the West. Rather than an era of peace, Huntingdon forecast a new struggle between what he viewed as irreconcilable enemies: Islam and the West.

Huntington asserted that identity, rather than ideology, lay at the heart of contemporary politics. “What are you?”, he asked, “and as we know, from Bosnia to the Caucasus to the Sudan, the wrong answer to that question can mean a bullet in the head.”

The Myth of V-Shape US Economic Recovery

By Dr. Jack Rasmus, April 29, 2020

The spin is in! Trump administration economic ‘message bearers’, Steve Mnuchin, US Treasury Secretary, and Kevin Hasset, senior economic adviser to Trump, this past Sunday on the Washington TV talking heads circuit launched a coordinated effort to calm the growing public concern that the current economic contraction may be as bad (or worse) than the great depression of the 1930s.

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Statistical indicators from the city of Detroit and the state of Michigan reveal that the rate of infections and deaths resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic are on the decline.

During the early weeks of April the state of Michigan was ranking third in the number of deaths and the city of Detroit held the undesirable position of having the highest mortality rates above any other region in the United States.

By the conclusion of the month, it appears as if the shelter-in-place and other emergency declarations issued by Governor Gretchen Whitmer have had an effect on curbing transmissions. Many more people are wearing masks and engaging in social distancing on the streets and in businesses declared essential which remain open.

Data provided by the authorities say the city suffered 251 deaths between April 6-12, 240 deaths from April 13-19 and 124 during April 20-26. As of April 29, nearly 1,000 people have died in Detroit while 8,811 people have been infected.

In the state of Michigan altogether there are 39,262 cases reported resulting in 3,547 deaths since March 10 when the first patient was confirmed. The U.S. as a country is leading in the number of confirmed COVID-19 infections with 1,046, 426 out of 3.5 million worldwide. There have been over 60,000 deaths in the U.S., out of 225,000 internationally, with concentrations of infections and deaths in states such as New York, New Jersey, California, Massachusetts, Illinois, California and Pennsylvania. At the time of this writing Michigan was listed as having the seventh highest number of infections and the third largest in regard to deaths.

Michigan chart showing number of COVID-19 infections

Nonetheless, the problems in Detroit have by no means been resolved amid continuing significantly high rates of infection and deaths. Hospitals are allocating substantial resources to treat COVID-19 patients while healthcare institutions have laid-off employees. At least 2,200 nurses, doctors and various healthcare workers have contracted the virus requiring quarantine and hospitalization.

Nursing Homes Expose the Capitalist Crisis Related to COVID-19

A major concentration of infections and deaths has occurred in the senior and convalescent homes located in the city and suburbs. The problem was largely hidden due to the focus on hospitals and public service agencies. Relatives and others concerned about the health status of patients living in nursing homes say they were denied information from administrators.

A major testing initiative conducted by the City of Detroit and Wayne County revealed that hundreds of infections occurred in these facilities among both the patients and workers. The conditions prevailing among senior residents in Detroit are reflective of the challenges facing working and poor people around the U.S.

In the state of Michigan there are 2,637 COVID-19 confirmed cases in the nursing homes. The bulk of these infections are being reported in the Detroit Metropolitan area. This problem has been allowed to persist due the substandard living conditions prevailing in the senior homes where staff members are often low-paid and overloaded with employment responsibilities.

Kim Russell of WXYZ said of the situation in Michigan:

“If you take a look at state data you will see that across Michigan there are nursing homes reporting cases of COVID-19, but most cases are in the communities hardest hit in Metro-Detroit. Taking a look at the three facilities with the most in the state they are Imperial Healthcare Centre in Dearborn Heights with 76 cases, Ambassador Nursing and Rehab Center in Detroit with 70, and Regency A Villa Center in Taylor with 65.”

The Michigan Department of Health finally in late April released the names of nursing home facilities where there have been COVID-19 cases and deaths. 75% of the infections are reported in the tri-county areas surrounding Detroit which are Macomb, Wayne and Oakland.

Governor Whitmer issued an executive order after the large-scale infections in nursing homes were uncovered. The order is ostensibly designed to ensure the safety and well-being of residents and employees.

However, the question becomes why have these horrendous conditions in the senior long term health facilities been allowed to deteriorate to such a level? Where was the State of Michigan, Tri-county officials and the City of Detroit administration prior to the outbreak of COVID-19 in the nursing homes?

These developments illustrate that the current profit-driven privatized healthcare system in the U.S. represents a serious threat to the security of the people who reside inside the country. There are still large segments of the population in cities like Detroit, Chicago, New Orleans, New York City, Boston, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, among others that have no medical insurance.

Despite the rapid and pervasive spread of COVID-19 among seniors, there is no reference within the corporate media in regard to the need for universal guaranteed healthcare coverage for everyone living in the U.S. The lack of medical coverage is becoming even more calamitous with the loss of tens of millions of jobs and incomes since mid-March.

Jails, Juvenile Detention Centers and Prisons: Infections Spread Along with Resistance

The U.S. has the highest per capita prison population in the world and the advent of COVID-19 is confirming the dangerous situation which this creates for those inside and outside of the prison-industrial-complex. There are approximately 2.5 million people incarcerated in jails and prisons where inmates are disproportionately African American and Latin American descendants.

Where there has been testing in prisons in various states across the U.S., the infection rates have been extremely high. This phenomenon holds true for the state of Michigan as well where inmates and their families are demanding testing, personal protective equipment (PPE), medical treatment and early release.

Image on the right: Michigan Lakeland Correctional Facility in Coldwater

A report published by WZZM, an ABC News affiliate, says:

“The first round of mass testing at a Michigan prison facility revealed that more than half of the prisoners there had COVID-19. Of the 1,403 inmates tested at Lakeland Correctional Facility in Branch County, 785 of them tested positive for the virus. There are about 30 inmates still awaiting results as of Monday (April 27) morning.”

Another article addressing the problems at Lakeland Correctional Facility emphasizes that:

“The coronavirus has swept through Lakeland unabated, three inmates told HuffPost. At least 13 men have died and more than 50 have been hospitalized. Of 266 inmates that the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) tested for the virus in units that hold patients with other health issues, 208 came back positive. Overall, about 57% of Lakeland’s 1,400 prisoners have tested positive.”

A class action lawsuit has been filed on behalf of inmates across the state which accuses the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) of failing to provide protection for prisoners and even deliberately allowing them to be infected. The legal action was taken by the Michigan State University Civil Rights Clinic on behalf of 37,000 prisoners in the state where in some facilities the infection rate is as high as 87%.

Prisoners say they have been told by guards that there is nothing the system can do to protect them from COVID-19 spreading in the facilities. The lawsuit demands that the prisons implement the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines which were issued doing the month of March.

Juvenile detention centers in Michigan are also a cause for concern. There was a recent case of COVID-19 reported in Muskegon County where dozens of youth are being held.

The Kent County Juvenile Detention Center reported five cases during early April, three among staff and two inmates. Although Governor Whitmer signed an executive order mandating the release of people from jails and youth detention facilities who posed no risk to the public, the measure provides nothing in regard to relief for those endangered by the MDOC. (See this)

Capitalism, Racism and the Quest for Self-Determination

There has been some cursory discussion in the corporate media as it relates to the disproportionate rates of COVID-19 infections and deaths among African Americans and other nationally oppressed groups in the U.S. The data released by various municipalities and state governments confirms clearly that the U.S. is not an egalitarian society.

The national and class struggles of the majority of people in Detroit and in the key municipalities around the state of Michigan is a direct result of the undemocratic implementation of corporate policies which only benefit the financial institutions and the wealthy business interests. In the administrative and legislative branches of Detroit’s city government, the leadership has failed in the recent period to protect the welfare and public health of the majority African American majority.

Corporate-oriented and bank-imposed Mayor Mike Duggan said in a press conference on April 28 that he wants to establish the most rigorous health screening methods in the U.S. Interestingly enough, this is the same individual who opposed a moratorium on water shut-offs and property tax foreclosures since he was installed in office during the illegal period of Emergency Management and Bankruptcy in 2013-2014.

The Duggan-Gilbert program is designed to facilitate the rapid transfer of public assets and taxes to private interests. This has been actual source of the healthcare crisis in Detroit where the majority 80% African American residents are routinely ignored and suppressed in favor of the outside corporate entities subsidized through abatements and revenue captures.

These conditions in Detroit can only be resolved through the independent actions of the people geared towards the eradication of the capitalist methods of production and distribution. The pandemic has proven that only the transformation of the U.S. towards socialism can address the existing and worsening conditions of working people and the oppressed in the current period and the foreseeable future.

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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from the author; featured image: Detroit SEIU worker protests outside nursing home

GIULIETTO CHIESA remained on the front line of the fight, to implement Article 11 of the Constitution, to take Italy out of the “War System”. 

Giulietto Chiesa passed away a few hours after the conclusion, on the 75th Anniversary of the Liberation and the end of the Second World War, of the International Conference of April 25th” Let’s Free ourselves from the virus of war.”

His Legacy Will Live 

Five years ago, when we set up the No War No Nato Committee, we have been with him in the continuous commitment to provide truthful information on the real causes of wars;

for a sovereign and neutral Italy, outside NATO and any other military alliance;

for the total elimination of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction;

to put an end to the waste of enormous resources destined to weapons and wars;

for a new economic and social system that eliminates the causes that are at the origin of wars.

We remember the last words pronounced by Giulietto Chiesa at the conclusion of the Conference of April 25th, at the end of the political commitment of his whole life. Truthful, crude words about the gravity of the crisis we are living in. Words that call to the struggle to regain constitutional freedoms:

“We have come to the end of this marathon, which I hope has been interesting for all of you. Many new things have been exposed, with other new international voices.

We give each other a goodbye, a physical goodbye when we can meet again, although I think it will not be easy to regain the constitutional freedoms that have been suspended, and we know why.

We can already see signs showing us the difficult situations in which we will have to fight to regain the freedoms that have been suspended.

We need to know that the situation will be much more critical, much more dramatic.

There is an economic crisis of gigantic proportions that will involve and overwhelm (I am afraid) Italy.

Those who are using this situation as a tool to hit the weakest, and the weakest have already been hit, those who have the sticks of command will use them, and so it will be our task, all together, to build a barrier and a capacity for recovery. We must think about a different policy to get out of this situation.

This conference took place online, but there will be and we will have to make sure that there are other moments of political struggle and combat that are physical, where we can find ourselves and look each other in the eye”.

Giullietto Chiesa‘s Legacy Will Live Forever in the History of Italy, and in the History of the World.

US President Trump ordered a surprise withdrawal of US troops from Syria in October 2019; however, he bent to pressure from aides and Pentagon officials and soon reversed his decision. He then ordered about 500 US soldiers to occupy the Syrian oil fields to steal the oil, regardless of the violation of international law, or the reflection of state-sanctioned crime on the image of America. 

As the US armored vehicles left Qamishli in October, the locals threw rocks and rotten vegetables at them. The US had ditched its local allies, in favor of oil revenues. ISIS was no longer an enemy, and the Kurdish militia was no longer a partner. Now, six months after the US pullout of the northeast of Syria, the US forces are confronted by angry locals, deadly attacks, and the COVID-19 virus.  It appears the days of the US illegal occupation of Syria are numbered.

Ryan Goodman, the co-editor of ‘Just Security’ and a former Pentagon legal adviser filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act for the number of military and civilian defense personnel assigned to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria because the Trump administration has stopped reporting them publically since December 2017.  He said, “Providing this information would be a show of respect for the American public, who ultimately must decide what sacrifices our country should make in sending troops into war.”

“The United States Government and all its institutions represent and are accountable to the American people,” wrote Chuck Hagel, former Secretary of Defense, in support of the requests.  Trump had made a campaign promise in 2016 to bring US troops home from Afghanistan and the Middle East but has failed to keep his promise to his supporters.   With the 2020 election fast approaching, those troop numbers are being guarded like ‘top-secret’ files.

According to the Pentagon, 3,500 active duty US military personnel have tested positive for COVID-19, with 85 hospitalized, and 2 deaths. The numbers jump to more than 5,700, with 25 deaths when you include civilian employees, contractors, and military dependents.

Health experts fear that COVID-19 could spread like wildfire across Syria, and US troop movements or rotations could help to spread the virus, as Iraq has a very large number of cases and there are US troops there as well.  Movement of US troops between Iraq and Syria could be lethal for Syrians as well as American soldiers.

The first reported death from COVID-19 in Syria occurred in Qamishli which is the same region some of the US troops are present. The Syrian Ministry of Health works closely with the WHO and has a central lab for testing in Damascus.  However, the northeast of Syria, and Qamishli in particular, are not under the direct control of the central Syrian government.  The northeast of Syria is in chaos, as Russian, Syrian, Turkish, Kurdish, and US forces are all present, but not all working together.  The rest of Syria is calm, stable, and prepared to face COVID-19.

“This epidemic is a way for Damascus to show that the Syrian state is efficient and all territories should be returned under its governance,” analyst Fabrice Balanche said.

The pandemic may contribute to the departure of US troops from Syria and Iraq, where the Iraqi Parliament called for US troop withdrawal.

The Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said on April 23 there are reports of COVID-19 cases among the US troops in Syria, who are there illegally under international law.

“This means that Washington bears full responsibility for the civilian population and provision for their humanitarian needs on territories under its control east of the Euphrates and in the south near Al-Tanf, where the notorious Rukban camp for the internally displaced people is located,” she said.

Khirbet Ammu is an Arab village just east of Qamishli.  The Kurds, a minority in Syria, were the US partners on the fight against ISIS, but the local Arabs were not partners, and they are the majority in Syria. This village remained loyal to the Syrian government throughout the war years.  On February 12 a US military patrol got stuck in the mud, and another of their trucks had a flat tire. The US soldiers may have taken the wrong turn, down the wrong road, because they found themselves stuck and under fierce attack by armed residents shouting: “What do you want from our country? What is your business here?” One resident was killed, and another wounded when the US forces fired at the villagers.

Brett H. McGurk has served in senior national security positions under Bush, Obama, and Trump as the Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL.  He commented on the Khirbet Ammu attack as an example of a deepening quagmire for US troops.

On March 23 a US military convoy was stopped at Hamo, a village near Qamishli, where the 11 vehicles were forced to turn around and find a different route.  The Syrian Arab Army, which is the only national army in Syria, was assisted by the locals in an act of resistance.

An officer in the US Army was reportedly killed on April 6 in the town of Al-Sur, near the village of al-Wasi’a, in the countryside of Deir Ez Zor, where the US troops were ordered by Trump to steal the oil.  Also reportedly killed in the ambush were two Kurdish militiamen, formerly partnered with the US. The deaths occurred during an ambush by locals on the foreign military convoy.

Joshua M. Landis is an expert on Syria, and was aware of the reported incident; however, his Twitter account had a post from the US military denying the death, and accusing the Saudi Arabian media ‘Al Hadath’ with spreading false information.

A former senior officer in the US-backed mercenary unit Maghaweir al-Thowra (MAT) deserted his unit in Syria on April 14.  Samir Ghannam al-Khidr deserted the Eastern Syrian desert along with his whole family and 26 armed men.  The convoy was subject to a video on social media, which showed 8 pickups, 1 truck, 11 small arms, including 5 M-16 rifles, 4 large-caliber machine guns, 5 grenade launchers, and 6-7 thousand rounds of ammunition.  All of the vehicles and weaponry were US military property. Al-Khidr left the illegal US base at Tanf, which is home to about 200 US soldiers, and about 100 mercenaries of MAT. Previous desertions occurred in early April.

Locals in the village of Abu Qasaib forced the US troops to turn their convoy around on April 16 and go back to their illegal base. It appears the local resistance to the military occupation of Syria is gaining momentum.

The US military was seen crossing illegally from Iraq into Syria at al-Walid, on their way to Hasakah on April 18.  The US convoy consisted of about 35 trucks, carrying military and logistical equipment to steal the oil reserves and loot other natural resources in Syria.

The US military convoy was attacked with stones on April 22, by locals in the village of Farafrah, near Qamishli, who had set up a road-block.  Men and boys chased the Americans on foot while shouting, “Go back to where you came from.”

On April 27, a US Hummer vehicle that carried American troops was attacked by locals in Deir Ez Zor.  The vehicle was later found completely burned, but it is not known what became of the troops who were being transported to the important oil fields of al-Omar and al-Tank, which are being occupied by the US military, on orders by Trump to steal the oil.  ‘Al Mayadeen’ media reported the names of one sailor and one soldier, with eye-witness information that the two Americans were kidnapped.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is a Syrian-American award-winning journalist. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Mideast Discourse

The current disaster exists in large part because the U.S. healthcare system is the opposite of what is needed. It is fragmented, discriminatory and designed for corporate profits, not the well-being of the public. Even before the pandemic, the United States had the highest number of preventable deaths compared to other wealthy nations and a declining life expectancy.” —Margaret Flowers

While some U.S. lives may have been saved during the COVID-19 pandemic through a quicker and more coordinated action plan, the objective fact remains no plan could have been successfully implemented because a developed public healthcare infrastructure does not exist. Years of neoliberal austerity and privatization gutted public investment in healthcare for rural and urban working-class communities and led to thousands of hospital closings over the last few decades, decimating the already weak U.S. public healthcare system.

That, as well as capitalist environmental racism—where toxic industrial processing plants, waste dumps and pollutants from industrial agricultural operations produced the so-called “underlying conditions” of cancers, asthma and a whole host of upper-respiratory illnesses—translated into death sentences for many poor and working-class Africans.

Yet, the focus on Trump’s personality has shifted attention away from the structural violence of capitalist oppression and exploitation. In fact, it is not just Trump, but most of the capitalist class, pushing for a return to “normal.” That class consensus was reflected in opinion pieces and commentary in bourgeois rags ranging from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal. While it was not openly echoed by Democratic congressional representatives, it helps to explain why the Democrats went along with the measly $1,200 checks to workers. Those insufficient payments help to keep people desperate and ready to return to work, even if it means jeopardizing their health.

So, we must keep our focus on the system. That will ensure we are not confused by the diversionary politics of the rulers, who do not want us to notice their bipartisan collaboration to uphold corporate interests.

Press and media

The war being waged against the African/Black working class in the United States mirrors the anti-Black warfare being waged globally, thus producing similarly devastating health outcomes for Africans in Brazil.

BAP Coordinating Committee member Netfa Freeman places into historical context the U.S. state’s use of direct military intervention in response to what it sees as potential threats to social order during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ajamu Baraka, BAP’s National Organizer, argues the changing class structure of the African American population explains the questionable politics and policies of Black political representatives in response to the COVID-19 crisis. He gave this presentation as part of a two-day Black Is Back Coalition webinar.

Black public opinion has been whipped up against China while Black opinion makers have remained silent on the aggressive U.S. militarization of the African continent. Margaret Kimberley, in her latest piece in Black Agenda Report, uses a material, non-sentimental framework to understand how the U.S. state is using the COVID-19 issue to advance its commitment to confronting China.

If you were wondering why BAP launched the 2020 Candidate Accountability Pledge, BAP member Jose Monzon explained on U.S. Senate candidate Madelyn Hoffman’s livestream.

Take action

General Strike 2020 is calling for all workers to remain sheltered in place (in accordance with current medical guidance), encouraging participation in nationwide strikes (including rent strikes, debt strikes and labor strikes) on May 1, and asks workers to hang white sheets or towels outside of their homes as a sign of solidarity.

Sign the U.S. Peace Council’s Open Letter to the Government of the United States and the United Nations, demanding all U.S. and U.N. sanctions against the targeted nations be lifted, and all U.S. military threats and actions against them cease immediately.

No Compromise, No Retreat!

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Featured image is from City News Service

“We work shoulder to shoulder. We’re very close to each other…. I’ve had a fever and flu symptoms, but I take Tylenol and keep working.” María, worker from Butterball. Español

Marshal Khalifa Haftar of the Libyan National Army (LNA) has declared that his forces will take control of Libya, arguing that the UN-negotiated unity agreement is dead. The statement was made during a televised speech, in which Haftar reported that “the will of the people” gave him a mandate to govern, announcing that the LNA will take control of the country, radically changing the situation in the war-torn country.

“We thus announce that the General Command of the Armed Forces accepts the will of the people despite the burden of that trust, multiplicity of obligations, and the magnitude of responsibilities before God, our people, and conscience and history,” he said.

Haftar’s forces already control most of Libya’s territory and population, and have spent much of the past year advancing against the capital city of Tripoli to overthrow the Turkish-backed Muslim Brotherhood Government of the National Agreement (GNA). The GNA was created in 2015 after UN-mediated talks following the 2011 NATO-led operation by the U.S. that deposed long-time Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi and threw the country in years of civil war.

During Haftar’s speech, addressing the “free Libyans,” the marshal condemned the unity agreement that established the GNA, insisting that it “destroyed” Libya, and that the citizens had chosen another “eligible” leader.

“We have followed up the call that you announced to end the Political Agreement, which has destroyed the country and led it to the abyss, and also to authorize those you consider eligible to lead,” said Haftar, adding that the LNA would work in “building durable institutions of the civil state.”

In response to the announcement, the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli said Washington regrets “Haftar’s suggestion that changes in Libya’s political structure can be imposed by a unilateral declaration,” and urged the LNA to declare a ceasefire during the month of Ramadan that is holy for Muslims and while the country fights the coronavirus outbreak.

With the support of Turkey, the GNA has managed to repel Haftar’s latest offensive, including regaining a small amount of ground against the LNA near Tripoli in recent weeks. However, the GNA asked Washington for support, declaring in February that it would welcome U.S. troops on Libyan soil to help fight “terrorism,” the irony being that many of the GNA militias are jihadists themselves. It is not such a shameful prospect for the GNA to ask for U.S. assistance considering it once supported the very same jihadist militias in 2011 that toppled Gaddadi.

The NATO regime change operation in 2011 that was aimed at maintaining the U.S. global hegemony and toppling those who opposed it, forced Gaddafi out of power and ended in his brutal roadside execution at the hands of Western-backed jihadists. The end of his decades-long rule transformed Libya into a war-torn state, prompting armed conflict between competing powers and the rise of terrorist groups such as ISIS, which flourished because of the anarchy created in the midst of fighting. The LNA however emerged in the midst of the Western-created chaos as a unifying force for Libyans and aims to expel the Turkish-backed and UN-recognized Muslim Brotherhood government.

However, Haftar’s move to declare the LNA as the government has come as a shock for many international players, with Moscow describing it as “surprising,” according to Reuters via RIA who cited a foreign ministry source on Tuesday. The source added that “we support the continuation of the political process. There is no military solution to the conflict.”

Many commentators on Libya have argued that Russia has big influence in Libya like it does in Syria. The Russian Wagner volunteer group are contracted on the side of the LNA. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan claims there are 2,500 Wagner volunteers operating in Libya, but there is no evidence on the actual number.  Washington, Ankara and commentators from the West have pointed to the Wagner group as evidence that Russia is influencing events in Libya like it does in Syria, but this is just a distraction and diversion for their own responsibilities in creating the near 10-year chaos in the North African country.

Rather, Haftar’s surprising move even caught Moscow off guard. Turkey will surely act more aggressively now in Libya to defend the GNA, but to what extent is not known considering it battles a destructive coronavirus outbreak and sees its economy slumping, hampering its efforts for power projections in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The NATO powers of the U.S., Italy and France were the main Western players involved in Libya, however, with all three countries distracted by the coronavirus that has killed tens of thousands, Libya would be a minor concern for them. This has provided Haftar the opportunity to cease power with only the GNA standing in the way of complete control over Libya. As his power grab has shown, Haftar acts independently of Moscow despite accusations made by the West and he will surely begin a new campaign to complete the takeover of Tripoli.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

No country could fail to be shaken by the kind of profound struggle between all its political groups that currently prevails in Iraq. The US does not need to make any great effort to sow discord between the parties because they are currently intrinsically fragmented. The removal of Major General Qassim Suleimani from the Iraqi scene– whose personal objective had been to bring the various political parties together – was a major event, but not a game-changer. It did not profoundly modify the Iraqi political scene because he had already failed, two months before his assassination by the US, to persuade the parties to agree on a single Prime Ministerial candidate, following the resignation of Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi. Iraqi politicians put their differences above all else in order to protect their political influences, unmoved by the patriotic duty for unity in the light of the serious challenges facing their country.

Prime Minister Abdul-Mahdi was not mistaken when he once told me: “We do not know how to rule. We are good at opposing the ruler.”

No ruler in Iraq will be able to get the country out of its current severe financial crisis, the political acrimony, and COVID-19 health crisis, because the financial means are lacking. The pressure from the street, where protestors were demanding improved living conditions, will return stronger than ever. The low price of crude oil is undermining Iraq’s yearly income. The state’s budget deficit is skyrocketing; its external debts are persistent and its need for help from the World Bank, which is under US control, is greater than ever. America will not provide financial assistance until its demands are fulfilled and Iranian influence is removed from Iraq.

America rejects Iraq’s balancing policy. Iraq considers its relationship with the US only as important as its relationship with neighbouring Iran. Washington wants Iraq for itself, adopting one principle: “after me, the great flood” (après moi le deluge) an expression said to be often used by Louis XV of France to indicate that he is the centre of attention, no other consideration matter but his own self-obsession and that any other considerations are irrelevant.

The US is supporting Iraqi Kurdistan by expanding its “Harir” military base and establishing another large military base on the border with Iran. The message to Baghdad seems blunt: US forces will remain in the face of resistance from those parts of Iraq more subject to Baghdad’s authority. In Kurdistan, the central government authority is not as effective as in other parts of the country. The US supports the Kurdish Peshmerga and arms them through its allies, the United Arab Emirates, who are providing the Kurdish armed men with weaponry: four cargos full of weapons landed recently in Erbil.

It is not excluded, if Trump remains in power, that his administration will help the Kurdistan region detach itself from Iraq, as it may also support a Kurdish secession attempt in north-eastern Syria. In the part of Syria, the US is occupying with Kurdish help, US forces are stealing Syrian crude oil- even if its price is no longer sufficient to pay the expenses of the troops deployed around it- indicating that there is another reason for their presence, related to the US ally, Israel.

Iraqi protestors refer to the United States as the “Joker,” a powerful force exerting influence on events in Iraq, often covertly. This influence was evident in last year’s demonstrations, but most conspicuously in the Kurdistan independence movement. Kurdish officials already rejected the binding constitutional decision of the Iraqi parliament – in a clear rebellion against the authority of Baghdad –which demanded the US withdrawal from Iraq.

Iraqi decision-makers in Baghdad believe that US President Donald Trump acts only in accordance with his own country’s interests. He thanked Adel Abdul-Mahdi for his protection of the US embassy because it was attacked in Baghdad. The US President sent a positive message to Iran through Abdul-Mahdi and then, a few days later, killed the Iranian General Qassem Soleimani. The US administration is also working for Israel’s interests in Iraq – and not according to the “declared” interest of the US in building a strong and friendly Iraq-US relationship.

Trump did not listen to his protests when Abdul-Mahdi called him personally and told him that US actions in attacking security forces were angering the Iraqis and that any unilateral action would have catastrophic consequences for everyone. Rather, Trump listened to his aides who consider the Middle East leaders as subordinates, not allies. This US condescension serves the interests of Iran, which knows how to benefit from American mistakes, said the sources.

There is no doubt that Iraq is facing a crisis, with severe domestic bickering adding to the difficult economic and sanitary situation affecting all countries. But the greatest danger to the country comes from the Trump administration, which can only imagine subduing states by force. The US will certainly end up “reaping the whirlwind” rather than gaining a robust alliance with Iraq.

There is no doubt that Iraq is experiencing difficult labour in the midst of severe domestic bickering, plus the difficult economic and sanitary situation affecting all countries. But even more dangerous is the fact that Iraq is in the eye of the storm, pulled off course by the winds of Trump, who can only imagine subduing states by force. The US will certainly end up “reaping the whirlwind” rather than gaining any kind of robust allies.

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Featured image is from EJM

In modern warfare, one of the greatest weapons is the power to manipulate information. In a globalized international society, extremely integrated and connected by an infinite information circulation network, a media which controls the dissemination and content of such information is in an extremely advantageous position, as this power allows it to shape public opinion. In the mass society, we are all hostages to the dissemination of information and to the way it is carried out, which puts us in a position of extreme fragility, as we are daily forced to consume false information strategically manipulated by its disseminators.

Lies fill a large part of the mass media, as it is controlled by the most powerful groups in society and which are better able to guarantee their interests. In the Western world, the use of false information to denigrate the public image of people, countries, ideologies and movements that in some way oppose the liberal hegemonic ideology has become frequent. One of the biggest victims of this information war is North Korea, a country that is extremely denigrated in the West with numerous and repeated lies about its political regime and its society as a whole.

North Korean President Kim Jong-un was the youngest victim of the unfounded “death” news in Western media. In fact, it has become common for all North Korean public figures who are absent from the media spotlight for a few days to be reported as “dead” around the world – these death reports are often accompanied by weird accusations that such people were “sentenced to death”, even if there is no evidence for such conclusions. Once again, history repeated itself: after about two weeks without public appearances, Kim Jong-un was presumed dead by the West.

The trigger for world hysteria was Kim’s absence from the celebration of the last Day of the Sun – a traditional Korean holiday – on April 15th. Immediately, a media bombardment began in the West, with worldwide reports of the alleged “death” or “serious state of health” of the Korean President. The legend was generated around an alleged cardiac surgery, which would have been unsuccessful. According to the New York Post, the deputy director of HKSTV in Hong Kong said that Kim would be dead, citing a “very solid source” – which was not identified – while the Japanese newspaper, Shukan Gendai, said that Kim would be in “vegetative state” after undergoing cardiac surgery at the beginning of the month. On social media, the hashtag #kimjongundead quickly gained absurd popularity, being one of the most accessed on Twitter.

Apparently, the West wants to see Kim Jong-un dead, but the truth came out, with a series of official responses denying the avalanche of lies by the mass media. The South Korean intelligence service was the first to report the lie behind the information that Kim either died or was ill. “Our position in the government is firm”, special national security adviser, Moon Chung-in, said in an interview with CNN this Sunday (26), “Kim Jong-un is alive and well”. The adviser also said that Kim had been in Wonsan – a tourist town in the east of the country – since April 13 – which is why he was absent from public commitments – adding, “No suspicious movements were detected so far ”.

Then, a satellite photo captured an image of the President in Wonsan, showing that Kim is alive and well. The North Korean media then responded to the Western media offensive with several messages from Kim, confirming his health and thanking the messages of support received from public figures around the world who sympathized with the President’s alleged serious state of health. The most curious thing is that the lies invented by the West call attention for the degree of accuracy and complexity. Not satisfied with inventing death, vegetative condition and heart surgery, the media agencies released fake news stating that China had sent a team of doctors to operate Kim. Fortunately, Beijing denied the information immediately, leaving no doubt to its deleterious character.

In the end, Kim is alive, well and there is no concrete data that can tell us anything more accurate about his health. Obviously, the lie promoters already knew all this with antecedence, but they were concerned to make a lie in order to provoke inflamed reactions worldwide and destabilize Korea by tarnishing its image, portraying it as a dictatorial country, extremely closed and with a systemic censure – so strong that they are able to hide from the whole world a news as important as the death of their own president.

The darker side of this “fake news age” is that this false information drives big political decisions and is capable of influencing the actions of the people on large scale. Another example of the info-war power is Brazil, where fake news accusing China of having created the new coronavirus was officially admitted by the government, generating a serious diplomatic crisis between both countries and causing a wave of synophobia and hostility against Asians in the country, with Chinese immigrants being beaten on the streets. On social media, millions of messages containing fake news about the virus are spread daily and already completely permeate the popular mentality.

An important tactic of information warfare is the handling of which news should be broadcast. Despite the huge repercussions of Kim Jong-un’s “death”, very few agencies have so far reported about the farce of this information, or, if they did, have invested little in its dissemination. The reason is simple: in addition to the interest in spreading fake news, denying previous information is costly and damages the image of these media outlets, which prefer to keep the lie.

Even though Pyongyang denies Kim’s death, Beijing denies having sent doctors for heart surgery and South Korea itself admits that it is all about fake news, in the popular imagination of Western mass societies, an image of Korea as a “terrible dictatorship” and “the most closed country in the world” is already formed and can hardly be rebuilt without a strong media work committed to the truth (which is far from emerging).

The fact is that Kim Jong-un is alive and, more than ever, it is proven that most of the content released about non-Western countries is made up of fake news. In our times, the circulation of information is a real battlefield, really worthy of attention for purposes of national defense and strategy.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

David Swanson was to speak at a conference in Florence, Italy, on April 25, 2020.commemorating the 75 anniversary of Italy’s Liberation. 

The conference became a Live Stream. 

This was David Swanson’s speech at this important venue in Italy organized by the Italian Committee No Guerra, No NATO  together with Global Research.

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“Convegno internazionale “Liberiamoci dal virus della guerra” in occasione del 75° anniversario della Liberazione d’Italia”

Michel Chossudovsky (Canada), economista, direttore del Centro di ricerca sulla globalizzazione; Peter Koenig (Svizzera), economista con lunga esperienza nella Banca Mondiale, Guido Grossi, già dirigente Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, ci diranno come potenti forze economiche e finanziarie sfruttano la crisi del coronavirus per impadronirsi dei nostri risparmi e soffocarci con la stretta del debito, e cosa dovremmo fare per risolvere tale situazione.

David Swanson (Stati Uniti), direttore di World Beyond War; Tim Anderson (Australia), docente di economia politica; Giorgio Bianchi, fotogiornalista e filmmaker; Franco Cardini, storico e saggista, ci parleranno delle guerre in corso, funzionali agli interessi delle stesse potenti forze.

Vladimir Kozin (Russia), consigliere capo del Centro Studi Politico-Militari, Diana Johnstone (Stati Uniti), saggista; Kate Hudson (Regno Unito), Segretaria Campagna per il Disarmo Nucleare, spiegheranno come e perché aumenta la probabilità di un catastrofico conflitto nucleare.

John Shipton (Australia), padre di Julian Assange, Ann Wright (Stati Uniti), già colonnello US Army e funzionaria Dipartimento di Stato, ci parleranno delle condizioni disumane in cui è detenuto a Londra Julian Assange, il giornalista fondatore di WikiLeaks, incarcerato per aver portato alla luce i crimini di guerra USA, che rischia di essere estradato da Londra negli Stati Uniti dove lo attende la pena dell’ergastolo o la pena di morte; Giulietto Chiesa, giornalista, direttore di Pandora TV. ci parlerà della fondamentale battaglia per il diritto costituzionale di manifestare liberamente il proprio pensiero e per una informazione veritiera.

Israel has deployed additional units of the Iron Dome and Patriot air defense systems near the borders of Lebanon and Syria. Pro-Israeli sources claim that the country’s military is preparing to repel possible retaliatory strikes from Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed forces following the recent airstrikes on alleged ‘Iranian targets’ near Damascus.

Over the past year, the Israeli Defense Forces have been steadily increasing their military presence in the area of the occupied Golan Heights under pretext of combating the so-called Iranian threat. Syrian sources describe these developments as a part of preparations for wider aggressive military actions against forces of the Damascus government and its allies in southern Syria.

Late on April 27, Turkish unmanned aerial vehicles dropped leaflets calling on Idlib residents to support actions of the Turkish Army in the area of the M4 highway. Such actions by the Turkish military likely demonstrate that the negotiations with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which were held after a military incident between the sides on April 26, likely ended with no real progress. If the Turkish Army continues its efforts to de-block the part of the M4 highway near Nayrab by force, it may find itself in the state of an open military confrontation with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.

2 US soldiers were abducted after an attack on their vehicle near the Omar oil fields, on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, Syrian state media said on April 27. Arab media regularly report about security incidents involving US-led coalition forces and their proxies in eastern Syria. Earlier in April, Syria’s SANA claimed that a US soldier and 2 members of the Syrian Democratic Forces were killed in an attack near the village of al-Wasia in Deir Ezzor province.

On top of this, ISIS via its news agency Amaq regularly reports successful attacks against personnel of the Syrian Democratic Forces and civilians in the US-controlled area. For example on April 21, Amaq announced that ISIS forces had killed a “sorcerer” in the town of al-Sabhah. The victim was identified as Hassan Ghanem al-Osman. He became the third “sorcerer” killed by ISIS in eastern Deir Ezzor during the last two months.

The US-led coalition prefers to remain silent regarding the ISIS terror campaign, which is ongoing under the nose of its forces. However, it found time to comment on the April 27 report about the supposed casualties among US personnel calling it fake.

The Russian Military Police established a new observation point near the town of Tell Tamir in northeastern Syria. Kurdish sources claim that Turkish-backed militants regularly shelled the town and the surrounding areas during the past few weeks. They expect that the deployment of the Russians there should help to put an end to these regular ceasefire violations.

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The coronavirus depression is fast becoming as deep as the Great Depression. The federal government’s response has been too little, too late.

While sickness and death spread, while unemployment and small business failures soar, while health care and essential workers lack personal protective equipment (PPE), Congress is in recess until May 4.

The childlike dummy, Donald Trump, spouts bad advice daily in his televised briefings. Thursday he said we could beat the coronavirus by injecting disinfectants or somehow shining ultraviolet radiation inside our bodies.

Meanwhile, the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, is MIA. Is he sitting on a park bench somewhere feeding bread crumbs to pigeons?

Since the lockdown started five weeks ago, 26 million people have applied for unemployment insurance. But many qualified people have yet to receive unemployment benefits, or even get their applications accepted through overwhelmed state unemployment insurance agencies.

Economists estimate that the real unemployment rate may have reached 23% in April, which is about as high as it ever got in the Great Depression. The economy had contracted nearly 50% four years into Great Depression, while economists predict a contraction of 25% to 50% over a few months now.

Many of these temporary layoffs are turning into permanent job losses as businesses fail, particularly the small business that provide half of the nation’s jobs. Half of small businesses went into the lockdown with less than a month of cash reserves to cover fixed expenses like rent or mortgage and utilities. When small businesses run out of cash, they are dead.

The Payroll Protection Program (PPP) was supposed to keep these small businesses going, but like the unemployment insurance program, the loans are not getting to most people and the money allocated is far from enough to meet the need. 60% of small businesses have applied, but only 5% small businesses have received PPP funding.

When the lockdown started, Obama’s Small Business Administration head, Karen Mills, predicted a small business failure rate of 20% in a “best case scenario” and 30% in a “good scenario.” With a nearly 100% failure rate by the federal government in responding to the coronavirus depression, the carnage among small businesses and their workers is looking like a worst case scenario.

Big businesses are getting bailed out. Much of the money designated for small businesses has been snatched up by big businesses before small business’s applications were even considered. The half a trillion allocated for big businesses is being doled out to Trump cronies without disclosure of the recipients and without restrictions against firing workers or bonuses for executives. The Federal Reserve has cut its overnight borrowing interest rate for banks to zero and is engaged in unlimited trillions of dollars of quantitative easing to backstop corporate debt.

Meanwhile, essential workers—in hospitals, grocery stores, public transit, sanitation, food processing, package handling, delivery—are working in most cases without adequate or any PPE. We have already lost 83 transit workers to COVID-19 in New York City. We must demand an OSHA Temporary Standard to provide enforceable PPE protection for workers.

Most of the elements of the 5th Relief Package we need have been introduced by various members of Congress, but they won’t be included if we don’t speak up and demand real emergency relief.

Here are measures the 5th Relief Package should include to protect our health and well-being during the crisis:

• Medicare to Pay for COVID-19 Testing and Treatment and All Emergency Health Care
• Defense Production Act to Rapidly Plan the Production and Distribution of Medical Supplies and a Universal Test, Contact Trace, and Quarantine – – Program to Safely Reopen the Economy
• An OSHA Temporary Standard to Provide Enforceable PPE Protection for Workers
• $2,000 a Month to All Over Age 16 and $500 per Child
• Loans to All Businesses and Hospitals for Payroll and Fixed Overhead To Be Forgiven If All Workers Are Kept on Payroll
• Moratorium on Evictions, Foreclosures, and Utility Shutoffs
• Cancel Rent, Mortgage, and Utility Payments; Federal Government Pays Those Bills; High-income People Pay Taxes on this Relief
• Suspend Student Loan Payments with 0% Interest Accumulation
• Federal Universal Rent Control
• Aid to State and Local Governments Sufficient to Keep Essential Services Running
• Universal Mail-in Ballots for the 2020 General Election

A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found that over the last 600 years, the economic depression after pandemics persists for about 40 years, in contrast to much faster recoveries after wars. The difference is that capital is destroyed in wars that has to be rebuilt, but not in pandemics. Coming out of this pandemic, we should destroy the productive capital stock that has been heating up the planet and poisoning the environment and replace it with clean energy, zero waste production systems.

To rebuild our economy when it is safe to go back to work, we should invest public money on the scale needed to put everyone to back to doing what we should have been doing before the coronavirus crisis hit in order to protect our climate and our people. I have detailed a 10-Year, $42 Trillion budget for an Ecosocialist Green New Deal that would create 38 million new jobs rebuilding all of our production systems for zero-to-negative greenhouse gas emissions, zero-waste recycling, and 100% clean renewable energy by 2030 in order to reverse the climate crisis and other environmental problems.

This full-strength Green New Deal includes an Economic Bill of Rights to end poverty and economic despair. It provides for a job guarantee, a guaranteed income above poverty, affordable housing, Medicare for All, lifelong tuition-free public education, and a secure retirement by doubling Social Security benefits. We need the Green New Deal now for economic recovery as well as climate safety.

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Howie Hawkins is a Trade Unionist and co-founder of the Green Party of the United States. He is the leading candidate for the Green Party nomination for president in 2020. His website is HowieHawkins.US.

Featured image is from the author

Since death is one idea that has no history except as an idea and not a reality any of us has experienced, it is the most frightening idea there is and also quite simple. It is the ultimate unknown. It has always haunted human beings, whether consciously or unconsciously. It lies at the root of war, violence, religion, art, love, and civilization. The good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, why we like to win and not lose, pass and not fail, “pass on” and not die. It is so funny and so sad.  We would be lost without it, even when we feel lost when thinking about it.  And it is fundamental for understanding the action and reaction to Covid-19. 

Societies have always been people banded together in the face of death.  And since people are not just physical beings but symbolic creatures who can think and imagine the past and the future, societies are necessarily mythic symbol systems whose job is not only to protect people physically, but symbolically as well. Sometimes, however, the protection is a protection racket with racketeers holding people hostage to fabricated fears that keep them locked in a living-death.

Thus death, this most potent imaginative idea and reality that doesn’t exist except as a mystery about which anything we say is speculation, can be used for good and evil, depending on who controls society.  Death is the great fear, the human haunting that hangs by a thread over life like the sword of Damocles.

In 1944 in a newspaper column, George Orwell made an astute remark:

There is little doubt that the modern cult of power worship is bound up with the modern man’s feeling that life here and now is the only life there is.  If death ends everything, it becomes much harder to believe that you can be in the right even if you are defeated…. I would say that the decay in the belief in personal immortality has been as important as the rise of machine civilization.

Beliefs, of course, like “personal immortality” and all others, such as the recent rise in the belief in atheism, which is as much a belief as belief in God, are, partially at least, relative to time and place, and develop out of social storytelling. The “hard facts” on which many feel their lives and security rest are themselves dependent upon the symbols which give them legitimacy. Reality is indeed precarious with society suspended by a web of myths and symbols.  It is through cultural and social symbol systems that society’s meaning is transmitted to individuals, and it is within the symbol systems that the control and release of action resides.  In today’s electronic mass media world, those who control the mass media that control the narrative flow – the storytelling – control the majority’s beliefs and actions.

Since society is held together by this myth system – the beliefs and values people live for and live by – that sustains it, societies have always had to offer symbolic “answers” to death.  For without a meaningful symbolic for coming to terms with death, human action would be stymied and people would be reduced to what the psychiatrist Allan Wheelis termed “intense, preoccupying yearning.” Today we can hear such yearning everywhere.

Shortly after Orwell made his prescient comment in The Tribune, nuclear weapons were developed and used by the United States to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese civilians.  With those weapons and their use, the ages-old symbolic narrative of life and death was transformed in a flash.  “The significance of the possibility of nuclear death is that it radically affects the meaning of death, of immortality, of life itself,” wrote Hans Morgenthau.  The traditional symbolic sources that once served to allow humans to transcend death were fundamentally undercut, and the search for new modes of death transcendence was carried on beneath the portentous covering of the nuclear umbrella. A qualitative transformation in the meaning of human existence was thus brought about as humans, who had the weapons, replaced the belief in God as the holder of the power over life and death, since nuclear war could result in the extinction of human life, leaving no one left to die.

This is our world today, and it is where the Covid-19 story takes place.  A world not just of nuclear fear, but a host of other fears constantly inflamed by the mass media that hypnotize people through the conjuring of death-fear.

In his great work on group psychology, Freud showed us how it was not just mental contagion and the herd instinct that got people to join in group behavior.  People could be induced to become little children and obey their leaders because they have “an extreme passion for authority.” When leaders speak, the children hear the inner voices of their parents telling them to be careful, be very careful, the bogeyman is everywhere, so listen and obey. Freud, the Jewish atheist, and Dostoevsky, the Russian Orthodox Christian, were in agreement about people’s desire to give up their freedom to authority figures who would allegedly shelter them within their warm embrace.

The easiest way to do this is to convince people that death is stalking them, for the bogeyman is always death in one form or another.

It works to get people to support the terrifying sadism of wars against fabricated “others,” who are always portrayed as aliens who are out to kill the good people.

It works to get people to give up their freedoms out of fear of “terrorists,” who are said to slide and hide in the interstices of everyday life, ready to pounce and kill at any moment.

And it works to get people to obey orders to protect themselves from terrifying viruses that are lying in wait everywhere to strike them dead.

In his novel The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky said that people want miracles, mystery, and authority, not freedom.  His Grand Inquisitor, while a fictional creation, lives on in reality.  For the Grand Inquisitor represents those power elites across the world who wish to cower people into accepting their dicta on Covid-19 as truth without questioning its logic or rationale.  To question has become an act of insubordination deserving death by censorship or the defiling of one’s name via the term “conspiracy theorist,” a name used by the CIA to dismiss anyone questioning its murder of President Kennedy.  Death comes in many forms, and the fear of it has always been used by the powerful to render the common people speechless and obedient.

How can any thinking person, anyone not totally crippled by fear, not question what is going on with the coronavirus disaster when reading what Peter Koenig, a thirty-year veteran economist of the World Bank and World Health Organization, writes in his article “The Farce and Diabolical Agenda of a ‘Universal Lockdown’”:

The pandemic was needed as a pretext to halt and collapse the world economy and the underlying social fabric.

There is no coincidence. There were a number of preparatory events, all pointing into the direction of a worldwide monumental historic disaster. It started at least 10 years ago – probably considerably earlier – with the infamous 2010 Rockefeller Report, which painted the first phase of a monstrous Plan, called the “Lock Step” scenario. Among the last preparatory moves for the “pandemic” was Event 201, held in NYC on 18 October 2019.

The event was sponsored by the Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and the World Economic Forum (WEF), the club of the rich and powerful that meets every January in Davos, Switzerland. Participating were a number of pharmaceuticals (vaccine interest groups), as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s of the US and – of China.

One of the objectives of Event 201 was a computer simulation of a corona virus pandemic. The simulated virus was called SARS-2-nCoV, or later 2019-nCoV. The simulation results were disastrous, killing 65 million people in 18 months and plunging the stock market by more than 30% — causing untold unemployment and bankruptcies. Precisely the scenario of which we are now living the beginning.

The Lock Step scenario foresees a number of ghastly and disturbing events or components of The Plan to be implemented by the so called Agenda ID2020, a Bill Gates creation, fully integrated into the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) – target date for completion – 2030 (also called Agenda 2030, the hidden agenda unknown to most of the UN members), the same target date for completion of the Agenda ID02020.

I ask the question but I am afraid I know the answer: miracle, mystery, and authority usually defeat evidence and simple logic.  Fear of death and free thought scare children. The Grand Inquisitor lives on:

But man seeks to bow before that only which is recognized by the greater majority, if not by all his fellow-men, as having a right to be worshipped; whose rights are so unquestionable that men agree unanimously to bow down to it.

Death: A simple idea with such a powerful punch.

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Distinguished author and sociologist Edward Curtin is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. Visit the author’s website here.

Between unaccountability of elites and total fragmentation of civil society, Covid-19 as a circuit breaker is showing how the king – systemic design – is naked. 

We are being sucked into a danse macabre of multiple complex systems “colliding into one another,” producing all kinds of mostly negative feedback loops.

What we already know for sure, as Shoshana Zuboff detailed in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, is that “industrial capitalism followed its own logic of shock and awe” to conquer nature. But now  surveillance capitalism “has human nature in its sights.”

In The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene, analyzing the explosion in population growth, increasing energy consumption  and a tsunami of information “driven by the positive feedback loops of reinvestment and profit,” Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin of University College, London, suggest that our current mode of living is the “least probable” among several options. “A collapse or a switch to a new mode of living is more likely.”

With dystopia and mass paranoia seemingly the law of the (bewildered) land, Michel Foucault’s analyses of biopolitics have never been so timely, as states across the world take over biopower – the control of people’s life and bodies.

David Harvey, once again, shows how prophetic  was Marx, not only in his analyses of industrial capitalism but somehow – in Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy – even forecasting the mechanics of digital capitalism:

Marx, Harvey writes, “talks about the way that new technologies and knowledge become embedded in the machine: they’re no longer in the laborer’s brain, and the laborer is pushed to one side to become an appendage of the machine, a mere machine-minder. All of the intelligence and all of the knowledge, which used to belong to the laborers, and which conferred upon them a certain monopoly power vis-à-vis capital, disappear.”

Thus, adds Harvey, “the capitalist who once needed the skills of the laborer is now freed from that constraint, and the skill is embodied in the machine. The knowledge produced through science and technology flows into the machine, and the machine becomes ‘the soul’ of capitalist dynamism.”

Living in ‘psycho-deflation‘

An immediate – economic – effect of the collision of complex systems is the approaching New Great Depression. Meanwhile, very few are attempting to understand Planet Lockdown in depth – and that goes, most of all, for post-Planet Lockdown. Yet a few concepts already stand out. State of exception. Necropolitics. A new brutalism. And, as we will see, the new viral paradigm.

So let’s review some the best and the brightest at the forefront of Covid-19 thinking. An excellent road map is provided by Sopa de Wuhan (“Wuhan Soup’), an independent collection assembled in Spanish, featuring essays by, among others, Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler, David Harvey, South Korean Byung-Chul Han and Spaniard Paul Preciado.

The last two, along with Agamben, were referenced in previous essays in this running series, on the Stoics,  Heraclitus,  Confucius, Buddha and Lao Tzu, and contemporary philosophy examining The City under The Plague.

Franco Berardi, a 1968 student icon now professor of philosophy in Bologna, offers the concept of “psycho-deflation” to explain our current predicament. We are living a “psychic epidemic … generated by a virus as the Earth has reached a stage of extreme irritation, and society’s collective body suffers for quite a while a state of intolerable stress: the illness manifests itself at this stage, devastating in the social and psychic spheres, as a self-defense reaction of the planetary body.”

Thus, as Berardi argues, a “semiotic virus in the psycho-sphere blocks the abstract functioning of the economy, subtracting bodies from it.” Only a virus would be able to stop accumulation of capital dead in its tracks: “Capitalism is axiomatic, works on a non-verified premise (the necessity of unlimited growth which makes possible capital accumulation).

Every logical and economic concatenation is coherent with this axiom, and nothing can be tried outside of this axiom. There is no political way out of axiomatic Capital, there’s no possibility of destroying the system,” because even language is a hostage of this axiom and does not allow the possibility of anything “efficiently extra-systemic.”

So what’s left? “The only way out is death, as we learned from Baudrillard”. The late, great grandmaster of simulacrum was already forecasting a systemic stall back in the post-modernist 1980s.

Croatian philosopher Srecko Horvat , in contrast, offers a less conceptual and more realist hypothesis about the immediate future: “The fear of a pandemic is more dangerous than the virus itself. The apocalyptic images of the mass media hide a deep nexus between the extreme right and the capitalist economy. Like a virus that needs a living cell to reproduce itself, capitalism will adapt itself to the new 21^st century biopolitics.”

For the Catalan chemist and philosopher Santiago Lopez Petit, coronavirus can be seen as a declaration of war: “Neoliberalism unabashedly dresses up as a war state. Capital is scared,” even as  “uncertainty and insecurity invalidate the necessity of the same state.” Yet there may be creative possibilities when “obscure and paroxistic life, incalculable in its ambivalence, escapes algorithm.”

Our normalized exception 

Giorgio Agamben caused immense controversy in Italy and across Europe when he published a column in late February on “the invention of an epidemic.” He later had to explain  what he meant. But his main insight remains valid: The state of exception has been completely normalized.

And it gets worse: “A new despotism, which in terms of pervasive controls and cessation of every political activity, will be worse that the totalitarianisms we have known so far.”

Agamben redoubles his analyses of science as the religion of our time: “The analogy with religion is taken literally; theologians declared that they could not clearly define what is God, but in his name they dictated rules of conduct to men and did not hesitate to burn heretics. Virologists admit they don’t know exactly what is a virus, but in its name they pretend to decide how human beings shall live.”

Cameroonian philosopher and historian Achille Mbembe, author of two indispensable books, Necropolitics and Brutalisme, has identified the paradox of our time: “The abyss between the increasing globalization of problems of human existence and the retreat of states inside their own, old-fashioned borders.”

Mbembe delves into the end of a certain world, “dominated by giant calculation devices,” a “mobile world in the most polymorphous, viral and near cinematic sense,” referring to the ubiquity of screens (Baudrillard again, already in the 1980s) and the lexicography, “which reveals not only a change of language but the end of the word.”

Here we have Mbembe dialoguing with Berardi – but Membe takes it much farther: “This end of the word, this definitive triumph of the gesture and artificial organs over the word, the fact that the history of the word ends under our eyes, that for me is the historical development par excellence, the one that Covid-19 unveils.”

The political consequences are, inevitably, dire: “Part of the power politics of great nations does not lie in the dream of an automated organization of the world thanks to the manufacturing of a New Man that would be the product of physiological assemblage, a synthetic and electronic assemblage and a biological assemblage? Let’s call it techno-libertarianism.”

This is not exclusive to the West: “China is also on it, vertiginously.”

This new paradigm of a plethora of automated systems and algorithmic decisions “where history and the word don’t exist anymore is in frontal shock with the reality of bodies in flesh and bones, microbes, bacteria and liquids of all sorts, blood included.”

The West, argues Mbembe, chose a long time ago to “imprint a Dionysiac course to its history and take the rest of the world with it, even if it doesn’t understand it. The West does not know anymore the difference between beginning and ending. China is also on it. The world has been plunged into a vast process of dilaceration where no one can predict the consequences.”

Mbembe is terrified by the proliferation of “live manifestations of the bestial and viral part of humanity,” including racism and tribalism.

This, he adds, conforms our new viral paradigm.

His analysis certainly dovetails with Agamben’s: “I have a feeling that brutalism is going to intensify under the techno-libertarianism drive, be it under China or hidden under the accoutrements of liberal democracy. Just like 9/11 opened the way to a generalized state of exception, and its normalization, the fight against Covid-19 will be used as a pretext to move the political even more towards the domain of security.”

“But this time”, Mbembe adds, “it will be a security almost biological, bearing with new forms of segregation between the ‘immunity bodies’ and ‘viral bodies’. Viralism will become the new theatre for fractioning populations, now identified as distinct species.”

It does feel like neo-medievalism, a digital re-enacting of the fabulous Triumph of Deathfresco in Palermo.

Poets, not politicians 

It’s useful to contrast such doom and gloom with the perspective of a geographer. Christian Grataloup, who excels in geo-history, insists on the common destiny of humanity (here he’s echoing Xi Jinping and the Chinese concept of “community of shared destiny”): “There’s an unprecedented feeling of identity. The world is not simply an economic and demographic spatial system, it becomes a territory. Since the Great Discoveries, what was global was shrinking, solving a lot of contradictions; now we must learn to build it up again, give it more consistence as we run the risk of letting it rot under international tensions.”

It’s not the Covid-19 crisis that will lead to another world – but society’s reaction to the crisis. There won’t be a magical night – complete with performances by “international community” pop stars – when “victory “will be announced to the former Planet Lockdown.

What really matters is a long, arduous political combat to take us to the next level. Extreme conservatives and techno-libertarians have already taken the initiative – from refusal of any taxes on the wealthy to support the victims of the New Great Depression to the debt obsession that prevents more, necessary public spending.

In this framework, I propose to go one step beyond Foucault’s biopolitics. Gilles Deleuze can be the conceptualizer of a new, radical freedom. Here is a delightful British series that can be enjoyed as if it were a serious Monty Python-ish approach to Deleuze.

Foucault excelled in the description of how meaning and frames of social truth change over time, constituting new realities conditioned by power and knowledge.

Deleuze, on the other hand, focused on how things change. Movement. Nothing is stable. Nothing is eternal. He conceptualized flux – in a very Heraclitean way.

New species (even the new, AI-created Ubermensch) evolve in relation with their environment. It’s by using Deleuze that we can investigate how spaces between things create possibilities for The Shock of the New.

More than ever, we now know how everything is connected (thank you, Spinoza). The (digital) world is so complicated, connected and mysterious that this opens an infinite number of possibilities.

Already in the 1970s, Deleuze was saying the new map – the innate potentially of newness – should be called “the virtual.” The more living matter gets more complex, the more it transforms this virtual into spontaneous action and unforeseen movements.

Deleuze posed a dilemma that now confronts us all in even starker terms. The choice is between “the poet, who speaks in the name of a creative power, capable of overturning all orders and representations in order to affirm difference in the state of permanent revolution which characterizes eternal return: and that of the politician, who is above all concerned to deny that which “differs,” so as to conserve or prolong an established historical order, or to establish a historical order which already calls forth in the world the forms of its representation.”

The time calls for acting as poets instead of politicians.

The methodology may be offered by Deleuze and Guattari’s formidable A Thousand Plateaus – significantly subtitled “Capitalism and Schizophrenia,” where the drive is non-linear. We’re talking about philosophy, psychology, politics connected by ideas running at different speeds, a dizzying non-stop movement mingling lines of articulation, in different strata, directed into lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization.

The concept of “lines of flight” is essential for this new virtual landscape, because the virtual is conformed by lines of flight between differences, in a continual process of change and freedom.

All this frenzy, though, must have roots – as in the roots of a tree (of knowledge). And that brings us to Deleuze’s central metaphor; the rhizome, which is not just a root, but a mass of roots springing up in new directions.

Deleuze showed how the rhizome connects assemblies of linguistic codes, power relations, the arts – and, crucially, biology. The hyperlink is a rhizome. It used to represent a symbol of the delightful absence of order in the internet, until it became debased as Google started imposing its algorithms. Links, by definition, always should lead us to unexpected destinations.

Rhizomes are the antitheses of those Western liberal “democracy” standard traits – the parliament and the senate. By contrast, trails – as in the Ho Chi Minh trail – are rhizomes. There’s no masterplan. Multiple entryways and multiple possibilities. No beginning and no end. As Deleuze described it, “the rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoot.”

This can work out as the blueprint for a new form of political engagement –as the systemic design collapses. It does embody a methodology, an ideology, an epistemology and it’s also a metaphor. The rhizome is inherently progressive, while traditions are static. As a metaphor, the rhizome can replace our conception of history as linear and singular, offering different histories moving at different speeds. TINA (“ There is no alternative”) is dead: there are multiple alternatives.

And that brings us back to David Harvey inspired by Marx. In order to embark onto a new, emancipatory path, we first have to emancipate ourselves to see that a new imaginary is possible, alongside a new complex systems reality.

So let‘s chill – and deterritorialize. If we learn how to do it, the advent of the New Techno Man in voluntary servitude, remote-controlled by an all-powerful, all-seeing security state, won’t be a given.

Deleuze: a great writer is always like a foreigner in the language through which he expresses himself, even if it’s his native tongue. He does not mix another language with his own language; he carves out a non pre-existent foreign language within his own language. “He makes the language itself scream, stammer, murmur. A thought should shoot off rhizomatically – in many directions.

I have a cold. The virus is a rhizome.

Remember when Trump said this was a “foreign virus”?

All viruses are foreign – by definition.

But Trump, of course, never read Naked Lunch Grandmaster William Burroughs.

Burroughs: “The word is a virus.”

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This article was originally published on Asia Times.

Pepe Escobar is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: The Triumph of Death, fresco, Palermo, Italy (artist unknown).

While the US government has proceeded expeditiously to hand over trillions of dollars to the Wall Street banks and corporations, millions of workers who have lost their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic have been blocked from applying for unemployment benefits.

A survey published Tuesday by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) shows that the widely reported figure of 26.5 million workers who applied for jobless benefits over the past five weeks significantly underestimates the actual number of people who have lost their jobs since March 15.

The EPI survey reveals that for every 10 people who have successfully applied for unemployment benefits during the pandemic, three or four more tried to apply but could not get through to make a claim. An additional two people did not try to apply at all because the process was so onerous.

EPI summarizes the survey results in the following way:

“When we extrapolate our survey findings to the full five weeks of UI [unemployment insurance] claims since March 15, we estimate that an additional 8.9–13.9 million people could have filed for benefits had the process been easier.”

The EPI further states:

“These findings imply the official count of unemployment insurance claims likely drastically understates the extent of employment reductions and the need for economic relief during the coronavirus crisis.”

The inability of millions of workers across the country to even apply for unemployment benefits stands in stark contrast to the trillions of dollars that have been transferred from the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve to corporations, banks and the super-rich.

At present, the amount of “emergency assistance” provided to the corporations and banks by the US government—since President Trump signed the initial $2.2 trillion CARES Act on March 27—stands at between $4.2 and $6 trillion.

The denial of resources to unemployed workers while unlimited funds are made available to the ruling elite demonstrates that the officially stated purpose of the CARES Act—voted for unanimously by both Democrats and Republicans—as “fast and direct economic assistance for American workers, families and small businesses” is an utter fraud.

The unemployment benefits program included in the CARES Act has been, to a large extent, an elaborate exercise in deliberate mass deception. When Congress and the White House presented the additional 13 weeks of state-based unemployment insurance beyond the typical 26 weeks, plus an additional $600 weekly federal supplement through July 31, 2020, as a social safety net during the COVID-19 crisis, they knew very well that millions of unemployed workers would be unable to take advantage of it.

The Democrats and Republicans knew that many workers would not be able to get through to the antiquated systems in the state capitals across the country, which would be completely overwhelmed and unprepared for the number of people seeking to apply for benefits. They were counting on these systems being so backed up with delays and confusion that workers would give up and end up receiving little or nothing of the government money.

The banks, corporations and wealthiest individuals, on the other hand, were to get vast sums of money without delay.

In an example of the ease with which government money is flowing into the accounts of the largest corporations in America, the Washington Post reported on Monday that nearly half of the “payroll support fund” allocated to the airline and cargo industries had been disbursed. The Post report said:

“As of this week, $12.4 billion of the $29 billion in grants has been paid out to 93 carriers to keep front-line workers on the job, Treasury officials said. In all, airlines and air cargo carriers are eligible for more than $50 billion in grants and loans.”

Additionally, the Federal Reserve will shortly begin buying $500 billion in bonds issued by large US corporations. Although this cash is being provided officially as a “financial lifeline” that is to be paid back, there are no provisions in the Fed’s credit program requiring companies to maintain jobs or restrict the funds from being used for executive compensation, stock buybacks or shareholder dividends.

The EPI survey, starting with 24.4 million people who applied for unemployment benefits between March 15 and April 18, shows that the actual number of unemployed workers in the US is somewhere between 33.3 and 38.3 million people. This means that between one-quarter and one-third of the workers who have lost their jobs during the pandemic (8.9 to 13.9 million workers) have been blocked from applying for benefits.

EPI explained the methodology behind its study:

“To gauge how well the UI [unemployment insurance] system is handling the new caseloads, we used Google Surveys to ask 25,000 people, ‘Did you apply for unemployment benefits in the last 4 weeks?’”

EPI asked those who responded to this question which one of six different scenarios corresponded to their experience, such as, “I applied successfully,” “I tried but could not get through,” “I did not apply because it was too difficult.”

When added to the number of people who were officially without a job prior to the pandemic—7.1 million workers—the EPI survey results would put the jobless rate in the US at somewhere between 24 and 27 percent, eclipsing the highest rates of unemployment during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

In addition to jobless workers who have been prevented from applying for government assistance, a number of surveys have shown that substantial numbers of those who have successfully applied have not received any benefits.

A study by the Washington Post published on April 23 says that there is a backlog of three million unpaid jobless claims across the US, although “the true backlog is probably far greater.” A Pew Research Study showed that only 29 percent of the 7.37 million who filed for jobless assistance in March, or 2.1 million people, actually received the benefits.

Many states across the country are continuing to report “glitches” and “backlogs” in processing unemployment applications that have been successfully submitted. Among the states reporting delays in processing applications are:

• California: A report on Monday in the Los Angeles Times said that for Californians applying for unemployment assistance, “the last month has been a perfect storm of failures for a state government with a long history of technology problems.” Of the 3.2 million new unemployment claims filed in the last month, 76 percent of those applying have received benefits. This means that 768,000 applicants have not yet received an unemployment check.

• Florida: The state of Florida has published an online dashboard showing a total of 1.9 million applications for “reemployment insurance” since March 15. Because of confusion created by the state instructing applicants who had applied before April 5 to apply a second time, there are multiple applications in this total. Florida then reports 824,412 “Confirmed Unique Claims Submitted,” and of these, just 392,051 (47.6 percent) that have been paid any benefits.

• Oregon: A large percentage of the 300,000 unemployed in Oregon who have filed for government assistance have not received a check and cannot find out the status of their claim. The state’s antiquated systems have been overwhelmed by the volume of applications, and, according to a report in the Oregonian, thousands of workers have been given faulty information about their applications. “The department’s phone lines are overwhelmed, preventing callers from getting through,” the newspaper reports.

Amidst the dysfunction, chaos, incompetence and bureaucratic mismanagement of state unemployment programs in the US, there is a definite policy at work. The ruling class and both of its parties are intentionally withholding financial assistance from broad sections of the working class who are being devastated by the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic, while offering up unlimited funds in the trillions of dollars to the corporate-financial oligarchy.

There is a deliberate policy of using mass unemployment and the prospect of destitution, homelessness and hunger to blackmail a section of workers into going back to work under unsafe conditions. This policy is, moreover, aimed at the imposition among all workers of a permanent restructuring of economic and class relations, such that full-time jobs, wages, health care, pensions and social services such as education are gutted.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the financial collapse of 2008 was a foretaste of the social and political assault on the working class that is now unfolding. At the same time, millions of workers all over the world are seeing the true reality of capitalism—the subordination of everything, including human life itself, to the ruthless drive of the parasitic elite to increase its wealth. The conditions are being created for revolutionary upheavals. The conclusion that must be drawn is the necessity for a unified international struggle of the working class to put an end to the capitalist system and establish socialism.

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It’s just over a quarter of a century since the American political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote his famous essay on the Clash of Civilisations. It set the tone for a series of wars. 

Huntington was writing after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the end of the Cold War between Soviet Russia and the West. Rather than an era of peace, Huntingdon forecast a new struggle between what he viewed as irreconcilable enemies: Islam and the West.

Huntington asserted that identity, rather than ideology, lay at the heart of contemporary politics. “What are you?”, he asked, “and as we know, from Bosnia to the Caucasus to the Sudan, the wrong answer to that question can mean a bullet in the head.”

He added:”Islam has bloody borders.”

Western politicians like former US President George W Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair followed Huntington’s lead. For the last quarter century, many Muslim countries have been the target of the US and its allies.

Meanwhile Muslims have often been portrayed in Western media as lawless, radical ideologues and an existential threat to the world. This has given rise to virulent Islamophobia in the West with the rise of far right political parties in Europe.

I will argue today that much of this noxious hostility may soon abate in the aftermath of the coronavirus tragedy. This is partly because (especially in Britain) the sacrifices made by Muslims are so obvious and have been so great that this may lead to a belated change in public attitudes. The first four medics to die from the outbreak were all Muslim.

But there is a second factor at work: the coronavirus pandemic is reshaping global geopolitics. The West likes, perhaps needs, an enemy and the latest target is China.

Targeting China

China is being presented as the new existential enemy, just as Islam was 20 years ago. And by the very same people. The same newspaper columnists, the same think tanks, the same political parties and the same intelligence agencies.

After Huntington’s famous essay that led the charge against Muslims – or what they often call radical Islam – now they have turned their attention to the Far East.

US President Donald Trump, the world’s Muslim-basher-in-chief, has now started to attack China, rather as Bush, his Republican predecessor, attacked Iraq in 2003 and the “axis of evil” 20 years ago. During his campaign in 2016 he accused China of “raping” the US economy.

However, since the outbreak of Covid-19, Trump’s attacks have gained speed and traction. He has accused China of covering up the virus and lying about its death toll.

Earlier this month, he even stopped US funds to the World Health Organization, calling it too “China-centric”. British newspapers, which have cut down entire forests to vent their spleen against Muslims, have pivoted to the Chinese menace.

The Sun – which banged the drum to invade Iraq in 2003 – ran a story on a report alleging the virus was developed deliberately by China to “prove it’s greater than the US at battling deadly diseases”. Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, MI6, helped to build the case for Blair’s calamitous attack on Iraq in the notorious dossier on Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Now it has China in its sights.

Speaking on BBC’s Today Programme, former MI6 chief Sir John Sawers greatly surprised me by showing sympathy for Trump’s removal of funding from the WHO. He said: “There’s deep anger in America over what they see as having been inflicted on us all by China, and China is evading a good deal of responsibility for the origin of the virus, for failing to deal with it initially.”

In Britain speeches by former spy chiefs are always seen as representing the current view inside the office.

Meanwhile Britain’s acting prime minister, Dominic Raab, said that after coronavirus there is “no doubt” it will not be “business as usual” with China. Senior newspaper columnists Melanie Phillips, a long-time critic of so-called radical Islam, recently used her column in The Times to warn that the West can no longer “turn a blind eye” to China.

The cover-up

Of course, there are good reasons to criticise China. There is evidence to suggest that China has not been transparent over the early stages of the outbreak or its number of cases. On the other hand, plenty of other countries (including Britain) are guilty of cover-ups and deception too.

This is what makes the change of atmosphere around China so remarkable. Even the neoconservative think tanks, that have fulminated against manifestations of Islam for so long, have found a new opponent.

The Henry Jackson Society (HJS) has been one of most consistent critics of what it likes to describe as radical Islam or Islamism. Now it’s led the way with a series of recent reports and media appearances attacking China. Indeed their attacks on China in recent months have increased exponentially.

The latest was a poll conducted by HJS. It formed the basis of a Times article last week which found that “more than 80 percent of Britons want Boris Johnson to push for an international inquiry into China’s handling of the initial coronavirus outbreak”.

HJS associate Dr John Hemmings wrote in The Telegraph in support of Trump withdrawing WHO funding and warned of China’s growing “malign” influence. Matthew Henderson, director of Asia Studies Centre at HJS, launched a new series of videos with The Sun called “Hot Takes”.

The first episode asks “Is the coronavirus outbreak China’s Chernobyl?”

It was also an HJS report that provided the basis for a Mail on Sunday article suggesting Britain should pursue Beijing in the international courts for £351bn ($437bn) compensation over the outbreak. The Gatestone Institute has made the comparison between China and radical Islam most directly.

It ludicrously described the outbreak of coronavirus as “another 9/11 moment for the West”. My old friend Con Coughlin is the Telegraph’s defence and foreign affairs editor and distinguished senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute. He supported the Iraq war passionately. Now he has called on the WHO’s “pro-China” chief to resign.

MEE reached out to Henry Jackson Society for a comment but did not receive a response.

The new faultline

Some might say that since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West has been in need of a replacement enemy.

Bear in mind that Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations warning that “the faultlines between civilisations will be the battle lines of the future” didn’t only concern Islamic civilisation. Huntington warned of a second “challenger” civilisation besides Islam.

China, according to Huntington, was the most powerful long-term threat to the West.

Not everything will change overnight. I sense that Iran will remain in the sights of the White House, such is the strength of the personal bond between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

But we may now be reaching the end to the long period when the main “faultline” was Islam. It may well be that the West has now found itself a new enemy. If so, Muslims can breathe a little more freely.

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Peter Oborne won best commentary/blogging in 2017 and was named freelancer of the year in 2016 at the Online Media Awards for articles he wrote for Middle East Eye. He also was British Press Awards Columnist of the Year 2013. He resigned as chief political columnist of the Daily Telegraph in 2015. His books include The Triumph of the Political Class, The Rise of Political Lying, and Why the West is Wrong about Nuclear Iran.

The spin is in! Trump administration economic ‘message bearers’, Steve Mnuchin, US Treasury Secretary, and Kevin Hasset, senior economic adviser to Trump, this past Sunday on the Washington TV talking heads circuit launched a coordinated effort to calm the growing public concern that the current economic contraction may be as bad (or worse) than the great depression of the 1930s.

Various big bank research departments predicting a GDP contraction in the first quarter (January-March 2020) anywhere from -4% to -7.5%, and for the current second quarter, a further contraction from -30% to -40%:  Morgan Stanley investment bank says 30%. The bond market investment behemoth, PIMCO, estimates a 30% fall in GDP. Even Congress’s Budget Office recently estimate the contraction in GDP could be as high as -40% in the 2^nd quarter.

Mnuchin-Hassett’s New Old Normal

Despite the flashing red lights on the state of the US economy, the Trump administration’s key economic spokespersons are pushing the official line that the economy will soon quickly ‘snap back’. On the near horizon is a V-shape recovery coming in the 3^rd quarter (July-September) or, at the latest, the following 4^th quarter. The economy may be particularly bad, they admit, but be patient folks a return to normal is on the way before year end!

Speaking on Fox News Sunday Treasury Secretary, Mnuchin, declared the US economy is about to open up in May and June and “you’re going to see the economy really bounce back in July, August and September”. And Hassett echoed the same, just a barely less optimistic viewing the snap back in the 4^th quarter. Getting ahead of the bad news coming this Wednesday when 1^st quarter US GDP numbers are due for release, Hassett admitted a big shock is coming on Wednesday, to be followed by “A few months of negative news that’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen”. But not to worry, according to Hassett, the 4^th quarter “Is going to be really strong and next year is going to be a tremendous year”.

Meanwhile, the administration’s big banker allies were also making their TV news show rounds, singing the same ‘happy days will soon be here again’ tune. Bank of America’s CEO, Moynihan, appearing on ‘Face the Nation’ show, predicted consumer spending had bottomed out and would soon rise nicely again in the 4^th quarter, October-December, followed by double digit GDP growth in 2021!

The Trump administration is pressing hard to reopen the economy now! It knows if it doesn’t the contraction of the economy could settle in to a medium to long term stagnation and decline.  Business interests are pushing Trump and Republicans to reopen quickly, regardless of the likely consequences for a second wave of the virus devastating national health and death rates. There is a growing segment of US business interests desperate to see a return to sales and revenue, without which they face imminent defaults and bankruptcies after a decade of binging on corporate debt.  A growing wave of defaults and bankruptcies could very well provoke an eventual financial crisis which would exacerbate the collapse of the real economy even further.

The Fed’s $9 Trillion May Not Succeed 

So far the Federal Reserve central bank has committed to $9 trillion in loans and financial backstopping to the banks and non-banks, in an unprecedented historic experiment by the Fed. Not just the magnitude of the Fed bailout in dollar terms, already twice that the central bank employed in 2008-09 to bail out the banks in that prior crash, but the Fed this time is not waiting for the banks to fail. It’s pre-emptively bailing them out! Also new is the Fed is bailing out non-banks as well, trying to delay the defaults and bankruptcies at their origin, before the effects began hitting the banking system. Bailing out non-banks is new for the Fed as well, no less than the pre-emptive bank rescue and the $9 trillion—and rising—total free money being thrown at the system.  But it should not be assumed the Fed will succeed, despite its blank check to banks and businesses. Its historic, unprecedented experiment is not foreordained to succeed—for reasons explained below.

For the magnitude and rapidity of the shutdown of the real economy in the US is no less unprecedented.  Even during the great depression of the 1930s, the contraction of the real economy occurred over a period of several years—not months. It wasn’t until 1932-33 that unemployment had reached 25%.

As of late April 2020, that 25% unemployment rate was already a fact. The official government data indicated 26.5m workers had filed for unemployment benefits. That’s about 16.5% of the 165 million US civilian labor force.  Bank forecasts are 40 million jobless on benefits by the end of May. But respected research sources, like the Economic Policy Institute, recently estimated that as many as 13.9m more are actually out of work but have not yet been able to successfully file for unemployment benefits. So the 40 million jobless may already be here. And that’s roughly equivalent to a 25% unemployment rate. In other words, in just a couple months the US economy has collapsed to such an extent that the jobless ranks are at a level that took four years to attain during the great depression of the 1930s!

A contraction that fast and that deep likely has dynamics to it that are unknown. It may not respond to normal policy like enhanced unemployment benefits, emergency income checks, and even grants and loans to businesses on an unprecedented scale such as being provided by the Fed.  The psychology of consumers, workers, businesses, and certainly investors may be so shocked and wounded that the money injections—by Congress and by the Fed—may not quickly result in a return to spending and production.  The uncertainty of what the future may bring may be creating an equally unprecedented fear of spending the money. Economists sometimes call this a ‘liquidity trap’. But it may more accurately be called a ‘liquidity chasm’ out of which the climb back will prove very slow, very protracted, and the road strewn with economic landmines that could set the economy on a second or third collapse along the way.

Image on the right: Kevin Hasset (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The V-shape argument is predicated on the assumption that the virus’s negative effect will dissipate this summer. Those supporting the argument assume, openly or indirectly, that the economic collapse today is largely, if not totally, due to the virus. It’s not really an economic crisis; it’s a health crisis. And when the latter is resolved, the economic crisis will fade as well as a consequence.

But this assumes two things: first that the virus will in fact ‘go away’ soon and not hang like a dead weight on the economy. Second, that there were not underlying economic causes that were slowing the US (and global) economy already before the virus’s impact. The virus is seen as the sole cause, in other words, and not as a precipitating factor that accelerated an already weak and fragile economy into a deep contraction.  But the virus may be best understood as an event that precipitated and then accelerated the contraction of an economy already headed for a slowdown and recession.

These latter possible ways to understand the current economic crisis are of course ignored by the advocates of a V-shape recovery. In their view, it’s just a health crisis. And the health crisis is about to end soon. And when it does, we’ll return to the old ‘normal’ and the economy will snap back. But the depth and rapidity of the decline into what is, at least, a ‘great recession 2.0’ and perhaps something more like the even deeper and longer great depression of the 1930s, strongly suggests that forces of decline have been unleashed in the US economy that have a dynamic of their own now. And that dynamic is independent of the precipitating cause of the virus which, in any event, is not going away soon either. In all cases of such virus contagion, there has always been a second and even third wave of infection and death. And Covid-19 appears the most aggressive and contagious.

It’s not just the 40 million and likely more unemployed that define the unprecedented severity of the current crisis.

Millions of small businesses have already shut down or gone out of business. More will soon follow. And many will never re-open again. The average number of days of cash on hand for small businesses before the virus impact was 27 days. Many small businesses are projected to run out of that by end of April. That’s why we are not witnessing growing protests and refusals to abide by a ‘sheltering in place’ order announced by various state governors. Small businesses and their workers, both on the brink of bankruptcy are taking to the streets—encouraged of course by radical right forces, conservative business interests, and political allies right up to the White House.

The millions of workers who haven’t been able to get through to successfully file and obtain unemployment benefits, and the millions of smallest businesses who have been squeezed out of the Small Business bailout program (called the Pay Protection Program) are fertile ground for right wing propaganda demanding the country reopen the economy immediately, even if it’s premature in terms of suspending virus mitigation efforts and almost sure to result in a second wave of infection that will debilitate the economy again later in the year.

And the flow of funding from recent small business legislation passed by Congress has been bottled up by big banks gaming the system—first using the crisis to extract concessions from the federal government on further bank deregulation, getting guarantees by the government on liability protection, ensuring they receive lucrative fees and charges from the lending, and requiring the government to reimburse them for loans that might later default and fail.

In addition to the slow distribution of the loans by the big banks, the same big banks began re-directing the small business program loan funds first to their own largest and best customers. Thus the first $350 billion in Congress funding for small business was directed to the banks’ best customers in less than two weeks. A second $320 billion supplement just added is reportedly already accounted for in less than half that time.

Despite the data on jobs, small business, and GDP much of the liberal economist establishment appear to be falling for the Trump administration official line and spin that there’ll soon be a V-shape recovery.

Liberal Economists Buy the Mnuchin-Hassett Line

The dean of liberal economists, Paul Krugman, in one of his columns recently, says it’s not an economic crisis but a disaster relief situation. Kind of like an economic hurricane, he added, that once it passes the sun will come out and shine again at the same economic intensity as before. And then there’s Larry Summers, Harvard economics professor and advisor to Barack Obama in 2009, who agreed with Krugman, saying “it’s possible to collapse and come back quite quickly.” Or Robert Reich, Cal Berkeley professor and former member of Bill Clinton’s cabinet, who declared in another TV interview recently, that the crisis wasn’t economic but a health crisis and as soon as the health problem was contained (presumably this summer) the economy would ‘snap back’.

Theirs is economic analysis by means of weather metaphors.  And the error they all make is assuming that the fundamental cause of the crisis is not economic but the virus. They don’t see the virus as only a precipitating cause, exacerbating and accelerating what was a basically weak US and global economy going into the crisis, but instead the virus is the sole, fundamental cause of the deep contraction.

Krugman and other proponents of the ‘snap back’ (V-shape recovery) thesis all deny the counter argument that the current deep and rapid economic decline is precipitated by the crisis and that there is an internal economic dynamic set in motion that is taking over that driving the economy into a downward spiral regardless of the initial health crisis effect.

As one partial example of that internal dynamic: once the contraction in the real economy accelerates and deepens, it inevitably leads to defaults and bankruptcies—among businesses, households, and even local governments. The defaults and bankruptcies then provoke a financial crisis that feeds back on the real economy, causing it to deteriorate still further.  Income losses by businesses, households and local government thereafter in turn cause a further decline. Once negative mutual feedback effects within the economy begin, it matters little if the health crisis is soon abated. The economic dynamic has been set in motion.  Krugman and friends should understand that but either don’t, or are cautioned by their employers and political friends not to tell the whole truth lest it cause further concern, lack of business and consumer confidence, or even panic.

When mainstream economists don’t understand what’s actually happening, they hide behind their metaphors as a way to obfuscate their lack of understanding and ability to forecast the future. Or they employ the same metaphors to avoid telling the truth. But the truth is this isn’t just a health crisis. And it won’t quickly disappear even if the health issue were resolved in a matter of weeks or months.

Instead of pacifying the public with nice metaphors, they might just look at the recent past.   No snap back economic recovery occurred after 2008-09, which was a contraction far weaker in relative terms than the present, with fewer job losses and a much smaller GDP decline.

2008-09 Recovery Was No V-Shape 

Even after the less severe 2008-09 contraction, bank lending after 2009 did not return immediately or even normally. Only the largest, best customers of the big banks and their offshore clients received new loans from them.  Bank lending to US small and medium businesses continued to decline for years after 2009. And jobs lost in 2008-09 did not recover to the levels of 2007 just before the recession began until 2015.  Wages of jobs recovered from 2008 to 2015 was much lower compared to wages of 2007 jobs that were lost. The ratio between full time jobs and part time/temp/contract work deteriorated after 2009, with more of the latter hired and the former not rehired.  Real wages still has not recovered to this day for tens of millions of workers at median income levels and below.

So one can only wonder what the Krugmans, Summers and Reichs are ‘smoking’ when they make ridiculous declarations about ‘snap back’ recovery. They should know better. All they had to do was look at the evidence of the historical record post-2009 that V-shape recoveries do not happen when there are deep and rapid contractions! And that’s true not only for 2009, but even for 1933 when the great depression finally bottomed out.

Between 1929 and 1933 the US economy continued to contract. Not all at once, but in a kind of ‘ratcheting down’ series of lower plateaus as banking crises erupted in 1930, 1931, 1932 and then again in early 1933. When Roosevelt came into office in March 1933 he introduced a program aimed at bailing out the banks first, and then assisting business to raise prices. It was called the National Recovery Act. That program stopped the collapse but generated only modest recovery, and by mid-1934 that recovery had dissipated. It was then, in the fall of 1934, that Roosevelt and the Democrats proposed what would be called the New Deal, which was launched in 1935 after the mid-term 1934 Congressional elections. The US economy began to recovery rapidly in 1935 to 1937.  In late 1937 Republicans and conservative Democrats in the South allied together and cut back New Deal social spending. The US economy relapsed back into depression in 1938 until Congress, fearful of the return to Depression, reinstated New Deal spending and the economy recovered again to where it was in 1937. The permanent recovery did not begin until 1940-41, as the US economy mobilized for war and government spending rose from 15%-17% of GDP to more than 40% in one year in 1942.

But mainstream economists are not very attentive to their own country’s economic history. If they were they would understand that deep and rapid economic contractions always result in slow, protracted, and often uneven recoveries. There never is a ‘snap back’ when depression levels of contraction occur—or even when ‘great recession’ levels occur, as in 2008-09. It takes a long time for both business and consumers to restore their ‘confidence’ levels in the economy and change ultra-cautious investing and purchasing behavior to more optimistic spending-investing patterns. Unemployment levels hang high and over the economy for some time. Many small businesses never re-open and when they do with fewer employees and often at lower wages. Larger companies hoard their cash. Banks typically are very slow to lend with their own money. Other businesses are reluctant to invest and expand, and thus rehire, given the cautious consumer spending, business hoarding, and banks’ conservative lending behavior. The Fed, the central bank, can make a mass of free money and cheap loans available, but businesses and households may be reluctant to borrow, preferring to hoard their cash—and the loans as well.

In other words, the deeper and faster the contraction, the more difficult and slower the recovery. That means the recovery is never a V-shape, but more like an extended U-shape.

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Dr. Rasmus is author of the just released book, The Scourge of Neoliberalism: US Economic Policy from Reagan to Trump’, Clarity Press, January 2020; and the preceding book, ‘Central Bankers at the End of Their Ropes: Monetary Policy and the Coming Depression’, Clarity Press, August 2017. He blogs at jackrasmus.com. His twitter handle is @drjackrasmus and his website: http://kyklosproductions.com. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Shutterstock

The successful opening of Gwadar Port to Afghanistan lays the basis for expanding this trade network to Central Asia and Russia via N-CPEC+, which sets a positive example for how BRI-led regionalization can rejuvenate globalization after the coronavirus is finally defeated.

The launch Monday morning of the second round of the US “small business” Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was a debacle. Millions of family-owned entities, desperate for credit and tottering on the brink of permanent closure, were once again shut out from applying for, let alone receiving, government-backed forgivable loans.

As soon as the $310 billion program administered by the Small Business Administration (SBA) began taking loan applications at 10:30 am, its computer system, overwhelmed by the volume of requests, crashed.

Cynthia Blankenship, vice chair of Texas-based lender Bank of the West, told the Financial Times, “First the page would not load, and then it just showed us an error message.” The problems continued throughout the day. Blankenship said her bank was able to process only 15 applications.

TAB Bank in Ogden, Utah had prepared loan applications from 1,100 customers. Five hours after the start on Monday, the bank had gotten only seven loans processed.

The Washington Post quoted Paul Merski of the Independent Community Bankers of America as saying, “All of the reports I have around the country is that it’s been a disaster.”

The big Wall Street banks, which are making a killing off of the government loan program, having taken in $10 billion in fees in the first round, had warned the Treasury Department and the SBA that they had to prepare for a massive flood of loan requests, but nothing was done to avoid the logjam. The SBA said later on Monday that there were double the number of users accessing the system than one any day during the initial round of the program.

The banks have warned, moreover, that the $310 billion allotted for the restart of the program will likely be exhausted in less than a week.

The abortive start of the second round of the program immediately demonstrated that, like the first installment, part of the $2.2 trillion corporate bailout enacted in March, the vast majority of small businesses and their employees will receive little or nothing in relief from the economic collapse triggered by the coronavirus outbreak.

Big businesses were given top priority by the Wall Street banks administering program until the first allotment of funds ran out in less than two weeks. In round two, they will continue to grab a disproportionate share of the funds, while the vast majority of small firms, which employ 48 percent of the US labor force, will be left on their own.

The program, initially backed by $349 billion in taxpayer money, was presented by the media and both big business parties as a boon to businesses with fewer than 500 employees and their workers. Family-owned entities such as restaurants, beauty salons, barber shops, gas stations and small retail stores, as well as other small firms with little access to capital, could receive up to $10 million in government-backed loans that would be turned into grants if the businesses used 75 percent of the loans to rehire or retain their employees and spent the rest on rent and utilities.

Even if the reality lived up to the dishonest marketing spin, the program would do little to prevent a wave of small business bankruptcies and millions of job losses, since it is set to expire on June 30, many months before the economy can reasonably expected to recover from the steepest contraction since the Great Depression and the coronavirus pandemic is certain to continue causing death and sickness on a gigantic scale.

But even before the initial round of the program ran out of money on April 16, less than two weeks after it began, with only eight percent of small firms that applied for loans having received any money, it became clear that the entire operation was a corporate-government fraud.

Despite the fact that the CARES Act, passed last month with the unanimous support of the Democrats, did not require the SBA or the Treasury Department to disclose the identities of the firms receiving PPP loans, it emerged that billion-dollar publicly traded companies, including restaurant and hotel chains with thousands of employees, cruise ship lines, hedge funds, energy companies, medical device firms and other large businesses had received hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, while the vast bulk of genuine small businesses were shut out.

At his Monday press briefing, President Trump described the disastrous start of round two of the PPP as a “glitch,” and said the first round of the program had “worked out well.”

Indeed it had, for the banks and well-connected, large companies with hundreds of millions or billions in revenues and share values in the billions. Last week, press reports revealed that big restaurant chains such as Shake Shack, Ruth’s Chris Steak House, Potbelly Sandwich Shop, and J. Alexander’s had received loans totaling between $15 million and $20 million.

A group of hotel companies chaired by Monty Bennett, a Dallas executive and major Trump donor, received $53 million in loans. The firms control 153 properties, including luxury hotels such as the Ritz Carlton Atlanta.

Over the weekend, more damning revelations emerged. More than 40 hotels, including numerous Marriott and Hilton properties, received loans. AutoNation, Inc., a Fortune 500 company valued at $3 billion, the nation’s largest car dealership chain with 81 locations and 26,000 employees, received nearly $80 million from the PPP program.

The Los Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association, valued at $4.4 billion, received a loan for $4.6 million.

A number of large firms that have run afoul of the law were granted loans. MiMedx Group, an Atlanta-based medical device company with 700 employees, was approved for a $10 million PPP loan. Earlier this month, MiMedx entered into a civil settlement with the Justice Department, agreeing to pay $6.5 million to resolve allegations that it knowingly overcharged the Department of Veterans Affairs. Two of its former top executives were indicted last year by federal prosecutors in Manhattan on charges of accounting fraud. It was sued separately by the Securities and Exchange Commission and settled the case for $1.5 million.

Treasury Secretary Mnuchin as well as prominent Democrats, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have feigned shock and horror over the insider dealing, corruption and lying in connection with the so-called “Paycheck Protection Program.” This is a fraud. They were perfectly aware from the outset that the program was designed, despite the deceptive marketing, to benefit big business and banks and shut down small business and their employees.

In fact, the provision in the CARES Act that allowed restaurant and hotel chains to evade the 500-employee limit, so long as none of their individual units employed 500 or more, was negotiated by Republican Senator Marco Rubio and Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, known informally as the “senator from Wall Street.”

And all but one Democrat in both chambers of Congress—including Sanders and Warren—voted for the second round of the PPP last week, despite the stench of corruption and lying surrounding the program. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hailed the bill’s passage as a “historic, bipartisan vote.”

That bill, with $174 billion in addition to the $310 billion for the PPP, did not allocate a penny to aid state and local governments facing massive deficits and preparing to carry out brutal social cuts. Nor did it provide any money for food stamps, under conditions where millions of laid off workers are running out of money for food and massive food lines are spreading across the country.

On the eve of the launch of phase two of the phony “small business” program, Mnuchin announced new guidelines that will supposedly exclude large publicly traded firms, as well as hedge funds and private equity firms, from participating going forward. He also called on big companies that received loans in round one to return the money, and a dozen or so businesses have complied. Among those who have refused to give back the money is Trump’s buddy Monty Bennett, the Dallas hotel magnate.

No one should be taken in by Mnuchin’s exercise in damage control. Behind the chaos and incompetence that abound in the PPP program is a deliberate policy, one that is shared by the entire ruling class and both of its political parties.

Under the cover of the pandemic, unlimited funds are being funneled to the corporate-financial oligarchy and the stock market, while unemployment benefits are withheld from laid-off workers and credit is denied to small businesses. The brutal aim is to use mass unemployment and the prospect of destitution, homelessness and hunger to force a section of workers back to work without any protection from the virus, while slashing wages, pensions and health coverage for the working class more broadly and eliminating millions of full-time jobs. Millions of small businesses are, in the process, to be driven to the wall while mega-companies gain an even greater stranglehold on the economy.

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“Australia is always there, making trouble.  It is a bit like chewing gum stuck on the sole of China’s shoes.  Sometimes you have to find a stone to rub it off.” – Hu Xijin, Global Times editor, April 27, 2020. 

Disasters always invite blame – divine, natural, human – and the current calls of blame being directed with vengeful spleen have one target.  The People’s Republic of China is being accused for everything from having shoddy and irreverent diplomats to having dubious and duplicitous scientists wickedly unleashing viruses.  Australia, in China’s heavy debt for keeping its fossil fuel industry boosted and primed, is happy to be the stalking horse of powers keen to find the culpable and the guilty for the COVID-19 pandemic.  

The main thrust of the recent “target China” approach is the use of that mechanism any sovereign state will be suspicious over: an independent inquiry into the origins and ultimate transmission of COVID-19.  Such an inquiry serves two purposes: to identify the cause of the coronavirus and vest the relevant investigative body with powers akin to those of a weapons inspector.  Two parties end up being tarred in this: the World Health Organization, considered unreformable, and the PRC, considered recalcitrant. 

This seems to be an Australian brainchild as much as anything else, a provincial and parochial effort to shore up support and garner prominence on the international stage.  Australian politicians have seen such suggestions as benign and benevolent.  As Foreign Minister Senator Marise Payne described it, “Australia has made a principled call for an independent review of the COVID-19 outbreak, an unprecedented global crisis with severe health, economic and social impacts.” 

Labor’s foreign affairs spokeswoman Senator Penny Wong sees things similarly.  “We have to press for what is right,” she claims somewhat bombastically, “what we believe is right, for us and for the international community, and making sure that humanity understands how this virus started is the right thing to do.”  Canberra has ceased talking to China, and any sense of conviviality has dried up.  Support, instead, is being sought in France, Germany and the United States.

French President Emmanuel Macron has responded with diplomatic caution.  In the words of an Élysée official, he agreed that “there have been some issues at the start, but that the urgency is for cohesion, and that it is no time to talk about this, while reaffirming the need for transparency for all players, not only the WHO.” 

This is the language Beijing has hoovered up, with its envoy in Australia, Cheng Jingye, remarking that, “Resorting to suspicion, recrimination or division at such a critical time could only undermine global efforts to fight against this pandemic.”  China’s ministry of foreign affairs spokesman Geng Shuang put the point less severely.  “The urgent task for all countries is focusing on international cooperation rather than pointing fingers, demanding accountability and other non-constructive approaches.”

This is not a view taken in Australia.  Comments by Australia’s Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton this month suggest that unison and cohesion are not exactly on the briefing notes of ministers. As he claimed in an interview, it was “incumbent upon China to answer those questions [on COVID-19] and provide information, so that people can have clarity about exactly what happened because we don’t want it repeated.”  For good measure, he added that “we know that this is not the first instance of a virus being spread from the wildlife wet markets and we need to be honest about that.”  These remarks were made after an oblique reference to US State Department “documentation” supposedly detailing the spread of the coronavirus, something which Dutton personally had not read.

The Chinese embassy, ruffled, responded accordingly, using the Global Times as their platform.  In the view of a spokesperson, Dutton would surely have consulted the US documents before enthusiastically launching into an attack on China.  “Obviously he must have also received some instructions from Washington requiring him to cooperate with the US in its propaganda war against China.”  Cheng has not shied away from threats, suggesting that a boycott of Australian goods would be an appropriate response to any Australian-led inquiry. “Maybe the ordinary people will say, ‘Why should he drink Australian wine?  Eat Australian beef?’”

As with much in such spluttering accusation, kernels of truth are discernible in the foam.  Australia remains the unquestioned sentinel of US designs in the Asia-Pacific, and should never be confused with being with the angels of impartiality.  Any sense of that was killed off in the brief and dying days of the Whitlam government.  Washington sees Canberra as a natural front for Chinese containment, though such an effort requires gentle padding and coating to lend a certain plausible effect.  This involves, for instance, the avoidance of terms such as the “militarisation” of Northern Australia, or US “garrisons” operating on home soil.  Terms such as “rotation” and “friendship” are preferred.

Sentiment in Australia against Beijing is now almost militant, watered by claims of domestic interference from the PRC, cyberwarfare, and disputes in the South China Sea.  It is to be found in the usual pea-shot pugilists at Sky News to the otherwise more cautious assessments in Fairfax and The Guardian Australia.  “At the moment,” suggests Richard McGregor, “Beijing is like someone who lends you a book and urges you to skip the horrifying opening chapters and flip straight to the end, where the hero – in this case, the party-state – prevails, shining a path for the rest of the world to follow.”

An international investigation along the lines being proposed by Australia would also involve its own bit of chapter skipping, with China being found to be the villain at the yawn-inducing conclusion.  Such bodies of inquiry tend to suffer from an oxymoronic emphasis, since the investigators run the risk of already having their conclusions ahead of time.  In all of this, someone has to pay.  Partiality is lost in the zeal of getting a conviction, or finding a cause.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

Featured image: Chinese doctors in face masks deployed overseas. Photo: Facebook

Your Freedoms Don’t Have to be Muzzled Just Because You’re Wearing a Mask

By John W. Whitehead, April 29, 2020

It was 4:30 a.m. on March 12, 2020, in the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic that has most of the country under a partial lockdown and sheltering at home, when this masked SWAT team—deployed to execute a “high risk” search warrant for unauthorized firearms—stormed the suburban house where 21-year-old Duncan, a software engineer and Second Amendment advocate, lived with his parents and 19-year-old brother.

The entire household, including Lemp and his girlfriend, was reportedly asleep when the SWAT team directed flash bang grenades and gunfire through Lemp’s bedroom window.

Covid-19 Is the Perfect Catalyst for Trump’s War Against China

By Johanna Ross, April 28, 2020

It was just a matter of time before the blame game would begin. Donald Trump has long viewed China as an economic adversary. On the presidential campaign trail in 2016 he was accusing China of ‘raping’ the US and that the nation was responsible for the ‘the greatest theft in the history of the world’. The rhetoric has not changed much since then. Trump vigorously pursued his trade war with China in 2018 when he literally ‘ordered’ US companies to cease trading with the east asian nation. The President has attempted to influence policy beyond its borders too; pressurizing the UK not to embark on a deal with Huawei, the Chinese mobile phone network provider, to set up 5G across Britain. The US has never disguised its hatred of the firm, launching its own special vendetta against it, including the organisation of the arrest of the Huawei founder’s daughter and Chief Financial Officer in Canada in 2018.

The U.S. Wants to “Purchase” Greenland from Denmark

By Andrew Korybko, April 28, 2020

Greenland returned to the news late last week after an American official disclosed that his country will grant the world’s largest island $12.1 million in economic aid following reports last summer that the US was interested in purchasing this strategically positioned and energy-rich territory from Denmark. The author wrote about that at the time in his piece about how “Greenland Is Trump’s For The Taking If He Really Wants It“, which explained how the US could simply seize it from Denmark without suffering any serious consequences apart the negative press coverage that it would inevitably provoke across the world. Instead of undertaking that dramatic course of action, however, Trump is almost somewhat uncharacteristically opting for a much more subtle approach aimed at gradually swaying the island’s inhabitants and their local authorities to his country’s side through what can best be described as “economic diplomacy”.

Iraq: Official Warns of US Plot to Transfer ISIS Terrorists from Syria to Iraq’s Al-Anbar

By Drago Bosnic, April 28, 2020

The official warned of the US attempts to transfer a large number of ISIS terrorists from occupied regions of Syria to Iraq’s western desert province of al-Anbar. The terrorists pose a great danger to inhabitants of this area, as well as the bordering areas with Syria.

The aim of the US and its NATO and regional Wahhabi partners in crime is quite obviously fomenting tension and unrest in Iraq in the future, giving them an excuse to continue occupying Iraqi and Syrian territories, all under the pretext of “fighting terrorism”.

Is Trump Using the U.S. Military for Regime Change in Venezuela?

By Barbara Boland, April 28, 2020

U.S. policy towards Venezuela has been a head-spinning series of contradictions lately, with no end in sight. From placing a bounty on the heads of President Nicolas Maduro and a dozen current and former Venezuelan officials, to upping sanctions and sending the largest fleet ever to the Southern hemisphere to stop drug trafficking from Venezuela, the U.S. appears to be pursuing an inexorable path towards regime change.

Reports of North Korean Leader’s Death Greatly Exaggerated

By Stephen Lendman, April 28, 2020

CNN’s chief national security correspondent Jim Sciutto claimed he was “told by a US official with direct knowledge that the US is monitoring intelligence that the North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un is in grave danger following a surgery.”

US Launches Campaign to Accuse Syria of Inability to Curtail Coronavirus, Claims Syrian-Russian Joint Statement

By Sputnik, April 25, 2020

The United States has launched a propaganda campaign by accusing Damascus of its inability to effectively combat the spread of COVID-19 in Syria, the Russian and Syrian coordination centres said in a joint statement.

According to the statement, the United States has influenced the development of a UN plan for sending a humanitarian medical mission to the camp.

Can you help us keep up the work we do? Namely, bring you the important news overlooked or censored by the mainstream media and fight the corporate and government propaganda, the purpose of which is, more than ever, to “fabricate consent” and advocate war for profit.

We thank all the readers who have contributed to our work by making donations or becoming members.

If you have the means to make a small or substantial donation to contribute to our fight for truth, peace and justice around the world, your gesture would be much appreciated.

Last Wednesday, during the daily UK Government Coronavirus livestream, the head of the British Army, General Sir Nick Carter, bragged:

We’ve been involved with the Cabinet Office Rapid Response Unit, with our 77th Brigade helping to quash rumours from misinformation, but also to counter disinformation. Between three and four thousand of our people have been involved, with around twenty thousand available the whole time at high readiness.

To understand the implications of this statement, we have to go back to 2018, when Carter gave a speech to the Royal United Services Institute.

“In our 77th Brigade,” he said, “… we have got some remarkable talent when it comes to social media, production design, and indeed Arabic poetry. Those sorts of skills we can’t afford to retain in the Regular component but they are the means of us delivering capability in a much more imaginative way than we might have been able to do in the past.”

77th Brigade

Previously known as the ‘Security Assistance Group’, 77th Brigade was stood up in 2015 as part of ‘Army 2020’. The Security Assistance Group had been established following the amalgamation of the Media Operations Group, 15 Psychological Operations Group, Security Capacity Building Team, and the Military Stabilisation and Support Group.

77th Brigade is described on their website as being about ‘information and outreach’. But what does that mean? General Carter again:

We also, though, need to continue to improve our ability to fight on this new battlefield, and I think it’s important that we build on the excellent foundation we’ve created for Information Warfare through our 77th Brigade, which is now giving us the capability to compete in the war of narratives at the tactical level. [Emphasis mine]

It is in this context, then, that Carter’s words from last week’s livestream should be viewed. Carter has acknowledged that the British military is waging war on a section of its own population.

A Rapid Response

Carter mentioned working with the Cabinet Office’s ‘Rapid Response Unit’. Established in April 2018 and also known as the ‘fake news unit’, the Rapid Response Unit was given an initial six months’ funding. It brought together a “team of analysts, data scientists and media and digital experts,” armed with cutting-edge software, to “work round the clock to monitor online breaking news stories and social media discussion.”

According to the RRU’s head, Alex Aiken:

The unit’s round the clock monitoring service has identified several stories of concern during the pilot, ranging from the chemical weapons attack in Syria to domestic stories relating to the NHS and crime.

For example, following the Syria airstrikes, the unit identified that a number of false narratives from alternative news sources were gaining traction online. These “alt-news” sources are biased and rely on sensationalism rather than facts to pique readers’ interest.

Due to the way that search engine algorithms work, when people searched for information on the strikes, these unreliable sources were appearing above official UK government information. In fact, no government information was appearing on the first 15 pages of Google results. We know that search is an excellent indicator of intention. It can reflect bias in information received from elsewhere.

The unit therefore ensured those using search terms that indicated bias – such as ‘false flag’ – were presented with factual information on the UK’s response. The RRU improved the ranking from below 200 to number 1 within a matter of hours.

The Rapid Response Unit was given permanent funding in February 2019.

Three months following the establishment of the Rapid Response Unit, Theresa May attended the G7 summit in Quebec, Canada.

There she announced the establishment of “a new Rapid Response Mechanism“, following Britain’s proposal for “a new, more formalised approach to tackling foreign interference across the G7” at the G7 Foreign Minister’s meeting the previous month.

The agreement sends “a strong message that interference by Russia and other foreign states would not be tolerated,” she said.

“The Rapid Response Mechanism,” she continued, “will support preventative and protective cooperation between G7 countries, as well as post-incident responses”, including:

• co-ordinated attribution of hostile activity
• joint work to assert a common narrative and response

The UK government’s Rapid Response, then, is to create international agreement on a common narrative (via the ‘mechanism’), and then wage an information war on its own people to make sure that narrative is protected in the media (via the ‘unit’).

Fusion

During Carter’s 2018 RUSI speech, he explained the role of the mainstream press in “setting up a well-informed public debate”. He spoke about “political warfare” being war by other means, and he said that winning that war would require a “fusion” approach.

Here, he is referring to the Fusion Doctrine, which was launched during the Theresa May regime, as part of the 2015 National Security Capability Review.

“Many capabilities,” it said, “that can contribute to national security lie outside traditional national security departments and so we need stronger partnerships across government and with the private and third sectors.”

It should come as no surprise, then, that the Cabinet Office’s Rapid Response Unit is not only working with the military’s 77th Brigade, but is “leading on the ‘rebuttal of false narratives’ as part of the unit … [that also] involves the Home Office, DCMS, Number 10 and other agencies.”

The Corona-Narrative

General Carter said his 77th Brigade is “helping to quash rumours from misinformation, but also to counter disinformation.”

What misinformation and disinformation is 77th Brigade helping to quash? How much of the ‘disinformation’ originates from 77th Brigade in the first place?

Part of 77th Brigade’s role is:

Monitoring and evaluating the information environment within boundaries or operational area

They not only ‘counter’ disinformation, but also watch social media, analysing how disinformation, including their own, spreads; mapping the internet and the networks of people sharing content between each other.

And for that, they have thousands deployed, and tens of thousands in reserve, not only in 77th Brigade directly, but right across government and the third sector.

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Featured image is from UK Column

“If 2019 was the year of the street protest, of tear gas and rubber bullets, 2020 might be the year the street protest died, or perhaps fell into a deep sleep, and went online.”—Journalist Christopher Miller

Despite all appearances to the contrary, martial law has not been declared in America.

We still have rights.

Technically, at least.

The government may act as if its police state powers suppress individual liberties during this COVID-19 pandemic, but for all intents and purposes, the Constitution—especially the battered, besieged Bill of Rights—still stands in theory, if not in practice.

Indeed, while federal and state governments have adopted specific restrictive measures in an effort to lockdown the nation and decelerate the spread of the COVID-19 virus, the current public health situation has not resulted in the suspension of fundamental constitutional rights such as freedom of speech and the right of assembly.

Mind you, that’s not to say that the government has not tried its best to weaponize this crisis as it has weaponized so many other crises in order to expand its powers and silence its critics.

All over the country, government officials are using COVID-19 restrictions to muzzle protesters.

It doesn’t matter what the protest is about (church assemblies, the right to work, the timing for re-opening the country, discontent over police brutality, etc.): this is activity the First Amendment protects vociferously with only one qualification—that it be peaceful.

Yet even peaceful protesters mindful of the need to adhere to social distancing guidelines because of this COVID-19 are being muzzled, arrested and fined.

For example, a Maryland family was reportedly threatened with up to a year in jail and a $5000 fine if they dared to publicly protest the injustice of their son’s execution by a SWAT team.

If anyone had a legitimate reason to get out in the streets and protest, it’s the Lemp family, whose 21-year-old son Duncan was gunned down in his bedroom during an early morning, no-knock SWAT team raid on his family’s home.

Imagine it.

It was 4:30 a.m. on March 12, 2020, in the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic that has most of the country under a partial lockdown and sheltering at home, when this masked SWAT team—deployed to execute a “high risk” search warrant for unauthorized firearms—stormed the suburban house where 21-year-old Duncan, a software engineer and Second Amendment advocate, lived with his parents and 19-year-old brother.

The entire household, including Lemp and his girlfriend, was reportedly asleep when the SWAT team directed flash bang grenades and gunfire through Lemp’s bedroom window.

Lemp was killed and his girlfriend injured.

No one in the house that morning, including Lemp, had a criminal record.

No one in the house that morning, including Lemp, was considered an “imminent threat” to law enforcement or the public, at least not according to the search warrant.

Now what was so urgent that militarized police felt compelled to employ battlefield tactics in the pre-dawn hours of a day when most people are asleep in bed, not to mention stuck at home as part of a nationwide lockdown?

According to police, they were tipped off that Lemp was in possession of “firearms.”

So instead of approaching the house by the front door at a reasonable hour in order to investigate this complaint—which is what the Fourth Amendment requires—police instead strapped on their guns, loaded up their flash bang grenades and acted like battle-crazed warriors.

This is the blowback from all that military weaponry flowing to domestic police departments.

This is what happens when you use SWAT teams to carry out routine search warrants.

This is what happens when you adopt red flag gun laws, which Maryland did in 2018, painting anyone who might be in possession of a gun—legal or otherwise—as a threat that must be neutralized.

These red flag gun laws allow the police to remove guns from people merely suspected of being threats.

While in theory it appears perfectly reasonable to want to “stop dangerous people before they act,” where the problem arises is when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police.

Remember, this is the same government that uses the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.

This is the same government whose agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies to identify potential threats.

This is the same government that keeps re-upping the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the military to arrest and detain American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a threat.

This is the same government that has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.

Let that sink in a moment.

If you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you are most likely at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

Moreover, as a New York Times editorial warns, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the police if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, if you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law, or if you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car.

Needless to say, if you happen to be passionate about the Constitution and a vocal critic of government corruption, you’ve already been flagged in a government database somewhere.

Likely, Lemp was, too.

Now Lemp is dead and his family is devastated, outraged and desperate to make sense of what appears to be an insensible act of violence resulting in an inexcusable loss of life.

As usual in these kinds of shootings, government officials have not been forthcoming with details about the shooting: police have refused to meet with family members, the contents of the warrant supporting the raid have not been revealed, and bodycam footage of the raid has not been disclosed.

So in order to voice their objections to police violence and demand answers about the shooting, Lemp’s family and friends planned to conduct an outdoor public demonstration—adhering to social distancing guidelines—only to be threatened with arrest, a year in jail and a $5000 fine for violating Maryland’s stay at home orders.

Yet here’s the thing: we don’t have to be muzzled and remain silent about government corruption, violence and misconduct just because we’re wearing masks and social distancing.

That’s not the point of this whole COVID-19 exercise, or is it?

While there is a moral responsibility to not endanger other lives with our actions, that does not mean relinquishing all of our freedoms.

Be responsible in how you exercise your freedoms, but don’t allow yourselves to be muzzled or your individual freedoms to be undermined.

Understandably, no one wants to talk about individual freedoms when tens of thousands of people the world over are dying, and yet we must.

The decisions we make right now—about freedom, commerce, free will, how we care for the least of these in our communities, what it means to provide individuals and businesses with a safety net, how far we allow the government to go in “protecting” us against this virus, etc.—will haunt us for a long time to come.

At times like these, when emotions are heightened, fear dominates, common sense is in short supply, liberty takes a backseat to public safety, and democratic societies approach the tipping point towards mob rule, there is a tendency to cast those who exercise their individual freedoms (to freely speak, associate, assemble, protest, pursue a living, engage in commerce, etc.) as foolishly reckless, criminally selfish, or outright villains.

Sometimes that is true, but not always.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, there is always a balancing test between individual freedoms and the communal good.

What we must figure out is how to strike a balance that allows us to protect those who need protecting without leaving us chained and in bondage to the police state.

We must find ways to mitigate against this contagion needlessly claiming any more lives and crippling any more communities, but let’s not lose our heads: blindly following the path of least resistance—acquiescing without question to whatever the government dictates—can only lead to more misery, suffering and the erection of a totalitarian regime in which there is no balance.

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People  is available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected].

Featured image is from American Friends Service Committee

Sinclair Lewis wrote an important novel in 1935, It Can’t Happen Here. In the fictitious book, based on the threats at the time of fascism taking root in the USA, we see how this virus spread.

As with Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America we see how Charles Lindbergh’s leadership in the America First movement of the 1930s planted the seed for what has NEVER  subsided. That being simply the growth  of a  Proto Fascist mindset that resonates well today in 2020 Make Amerika Great Again (for the super rich!) Sadly, nothing ever real changes in the minds of some people… only the faces.

In David Talbot’s 2007 study of the Kennedy brothers during JFK’s administration, aptly entitled Brothers, we see the forces of Proto Fascism at work.

JFK inherited the Joints Chiefs of Staff from the Eisenhower administration, with General Curtis LeMay and General Lemnitzer leading the way for a pre-emptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. History now tells us what those in the ‘ Know’ knew since our U-2 flights over the Soviet Union in the mid to late 1950s: The Soviets were much weaker than us when it came to missile strength. The Joint Chiefs unanimously recommended such a pre-emptive attack, knowing full well that some of our cities would be severely damaged as we totally destroyed their entire country. JFK is said to have walked out of that meeting, saying to someone with him “Those guys are really crazy!”

What was also going on during those less than three years of JFK’s presidency, was a far right wing movement to infiltrate our military. This revealed itself to the leadership in the field by many ‘Born Again Commie Haters’ like General Lucius Clay, hero of WW2 and the 1948-49 Berlin Blockade. In October of 1961, as Talbot tells us, General Clay precipitated a nerve wracking confrontation with the Soviets at the Berlin Wall. Our tanks and their tanks stood facing each other like the ‘Gunfight at the OK Corral’ of western lore. Right before the **** would hit the fan, JFK, through a back channel arrangement his brother Bob had with the Russians, got the other side to agree to a mutual withdrawal. Meanwhile, far right wing forces here at home, like the John Birch Society, had been calling Eisenhower, hero of WW2, a “Dedicated , conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy”. Men like ‘Off the reservation’ Major General Edwin Walker announced on many occasions that the JFK administration was stocked with “No win Ivy Leaguers and confirmed Communists”. Throughout our domestic and foreign US military bases leaflets and films were offered to our personnel on a regular basis, ALL sounding the trumpet for a final war with the godless Soviets. When Arkansas Senator Fulbright took to the Senate floor to contradict far right wing forces like South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, the other side called for hearings when General Walker was relieved of his command in Europe. Things got testy, especially when Defense Sec. McNamara was called to testify. Dozens of white suburban housewives wearing Stop Communism tags swarmed him and joined 250 spectators in booing him.

Years before those aforementioned hearings, Senator Fulbright, in one of his speeches on the Senate floor, warned of a future ‘Military Coup’ … Isn’t that what happened in November of ’63? Hadn’t the French right wing generals attempted something like that earlier in 1961 against DeGalle’s plans to grant Algeria their independence? Few students of our jaded political history recall what happened a year later, in 1962, when Vice President Lyndon Johnson visited Dallas with his wife. He was there to support the Democratic Party candidates for the upcoming midterm elections. Johnson and his wife were attacked, once again by white suburban women, calling him and his wife, and JFK ‘Nigger Lovers and Commie Lovers’. It is said that Johnson and his wife had to be ‘spirited out’ of the hotel they were staying in, as if they were fugitives from a chain gang.

Now we are in the middle (beginning? I pray not) of a terrible pandemic. It threatens our economy along with the health of millions, especially the elderly and infirmed. What needs to be understood is what history reveals when right wing movements gain momentum during tough times, as with Germany during their terrible economic depression in the 1920s and early 30s. Why? Because right wing movements always find scapegoats to satisfy the rage of the many. We are already seeing this administration, and those who believe in Trump’s convoluted logic, pushing to reopen our nation’s businesses. Yet, because of the utter incompetence and ‘Pandemic denial’ by he and his administration, NOTHING EFFECTIVE  was begun during January, February and parts of March. No stocking or manufacturing of masks, ventilators, hand sanitizers;  NO sending of federal funds to strengthen our hospital systems and first providers; NO quarantine efforts and shutdowns in the early stages of this Pandemic USA. All of the above are reasons why this economy has NOT been reopened by now. Imagine if Trump acted as the Chinese did, and jumped all over the spread of this virus early on. He didn’t! So, his base, the ones demanding a totally OPEN economy, may very well march in lockstep as this Proto Fascist movement strengthens.

My fears, as a student of history, are REAL! We have a possible Army of citizens who may be easily influenced to join such a demagogue led movement. The anger and the frustration of many out of work and out of bread (the kind you eat AND the kind you spend) people can be the very fodder used by the actual super rich who helped create such movements. As with Germany in the late 1920s, and with Amerika just a few short years ago, frustrated and angry working stiffs got directed to go against their economic interests by propaganda masters. They blamed ‘Big Government’ and supported the super rich who controlled government for their own selfish interests. We who ‘Know better’ need to influence our fellow working stiffs about what we all not only need, but deserve! And it sure ain’t Fascism!

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Philip A Farruggio is a contributing editor for The Greanville Post. He is also frequently posted on Global Research, Nation of Change, Cross Currents and Off Guardian sites. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 400 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid‘ radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at [email protected]

Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court (STF) on Monday ordered an investigation against President Jair Bolsonaro, due to accusations by former Justice Minister Sergio Moro. 

Moro, who resigned from his post at the Ministry of Justice last Friday, accused Bolsonaro of interfering in police investigations.

In response to these accusations, the STF established on Monday that the Federal Police must interrogate the former minister within 60 days.

Brazilian Federal Supreme Court Judge Celso de Mello also requested that the conclusions of the investigation are delivered to the Attorney General’s Office.

Brazilian Supreme Court authorized an investigation on whether President Jair Bolsonaro sought to interfere with the Federal Police and gain access to confidential materials- as his former Justice Minister Sergio Moro accused https://t.co/mnUH8slQwH

— Raquel Krähenbühl (@Rkrahenbuhl) April 28, 2020

From the Prosecutor’s Office it will be possible to move forward with a request for a political trial against the president or an indictment for false testimony against Moro.

If the Supreme Court confirms Moro’s accusations, it will be up to Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings against Bolsonaro, which could lead to his dismissal from office.

This Monday, the Workers’ Party presented the STF with a criminal action against Bolsonaro and Moros on suspicion of prevarication, concussion and corruption.

These crimes were exposed after the war of accusations that took place between the two Brazilian officials last Friday.

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Water, water everywhere and hardly a drop is being protected by the Trump administration. In its latest act of abdication, the Environmental Protection Agency published its Navigable Waters Protection Rule in the Federal Register on April 21. The rule is scheduled to go into effect June 22, completing the elimination of the Obama administration’s Waters of the US Rule.

The original rule was designed to protect the majority of America’s water  based on hydrologic science, which clearly shows that water flows on many more surface and subsurface paths than just rivers and other obvious waterways. These many pathways in turn connect wetlands and tributaries with large lakes and wide rivers. Indeed, a 2015 EPA report that drew upon 1,200 peer-review studies found that all tributaries, even intermittent and ephemeral streams “are physically, chemically, and biologically connected to downstream rivers.”

The Trump administration rejected this indisputable science in favor of an eyeball test. The new rule essentially says that if you cannot see the connection between bodies of water, it does not exist.

On that basis, the Trump administration removed environmental protections from half of the nation’s wetlands and a fifth of streams and tributary headwaters. That makes them available for unregulated pollution from mine operators, chemical companies, fossil-fuel facilities, and pesticide-spewing factory farms. This is despite the fact that according to federal assessments, half of the nation’s rivers and streams, a third of our wetlands, and a fifth of our coastal waters and Great Lakes waters are in “poor biological condition.”

The EPA, run by former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, made a mockery of the rule’s public comment period by claiming to listen to a “wide range” of stakeholders in “robust public outreach.” And yet the only “stakeholders” highlighted in EPA press releases were lobbyists for polluters, partisan Republicans, and right-wing think tanks that also happen to specialize in suppressing voter rights, renewable energy, and gun control. Groups behind Wheeler’s rule include the American Petroleum Institute, the National Mining Association, the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Farm Bureau, the Heritage Foundation, and American Legislative Exchange Council.

To help out polluters, Wheeler arbitrarily eliminated consideration of most of the economic benefits and co-benefits of clean water.

The Obama administration calculated that up to $465 million in clean water compliance costs were outweighed by up to $572 million of benefits for recreational fishing, hunting, flood control, and enforcement savings. New York University Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity estimated that the value of wetland mitigation under Obama’s proposed protections was worth up to $1 billion. Indeed, by the Trump administration’s own reports, fishing, hunting, birdwatching, and other recreation associated with wildlife annually pumps $157 billion into the economy.

None of that factored into Wheeler’s dubious math, however, as he decided to ignore benefits and only focus on the purported costs to his industry cronies. But the problem is, the Clean Water Act doesn’t say anything about costs and benefits. It says: make our waters clean. So, no matter how Wheeler might want to fiddle with the numbers, his rule is a license to pollute—a  recipe for dirty water despite the law.

No science at the table

The blatant dismissal of the importance of clean water, from tap water to wildlife, caused scores of former federal scientists and environmental officials and the heads of virtually every major scientific society concerned with conservation to write Wheeler to emphatically protest the new rule. Wheeler did not listen to them or even to his own Science Advisory Board (SAB), which wrote Wheeler two months ago to say the agency did not incorporate the “best available science” to formulate Navigable Waters.

The SAB reminded Wheeler about the 2015 report emphasizing that “functional connectivity [in our water system] is more than a matter of surface geography.” In blunt wording, the board said the EPA, “offers no comparable body of peer reviewed evidence, and no scientific justification for disregarding the connectivity of waters accepted by current hydrological science.” By plowing ahead with a rule lacking scientific justification, the SAB said the EPA was “potentially introducing new risks to human and environmental health.”

Already derelict in enforcement

In reality, the Trump administration’s EPA has probably already introduced plenty of new risk into the water we drink and into the bodies of water we use for recreation. The day before the new rule was published, the Environmental Law and Policy Center (ELPC), a Chicago-based advocacy group focusing on natural resources in the Midwest, issued a report documenting a dramatic decline of state and federal clean water enforcement in the heavily-industrialized states sharing the Great Lakes.

The report quoted the Environmental Integrity Project’s recent findings that state pollution control budgets in Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana dropped between 16 percent and 36 percent between 2008 and 2018. The staff at the state level responsible for environmental protection in Illinois dropped from 1,028 employees to 639; in Michigan it fell from 1,568 to 1,228.

The ELPC, in its own data, says this these realities are compounded by the Trump administration’s very public dismantling of the EPA, not to mention its recent suspension of environmental enforcement during the pandemic. Staffing in EPA’s Region 5, responsible for Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Minnesota, has dropped 25 percent since 2011. Just as the EPA has fallen to its lowest national staffing levels since the Reagan administration in the 1980s, Nicole Cantello, an EPA lawyer who heads the union representing most EPA career staff in Region 5, said the numbers in her region are the lowest she knows of.

Correspondingly, enforcement cases under the Clean Water Act have plummeted from 340 case initiations and 351 case closures in 2012 during the mid-point of the Obama administration to 208 initiations and 205 closures last year. In the same time span the number of major facilities in serious noncompliance with the Clean Water Act have nearly doubled, from 122 to 211 (not including Michigan because of recording problems). Yet penalties and industry compliance costs assessed by the EPA have dropped dramatically.

Cantello said the loss of enforcement staff is particularly devastating because it takes many months of training and experience “to know a violation when you see it.” Plus, many staff members who have remained at the EPA have found themselves subject to a reorganization that has often taken inspection and enforcement powers away from seasoned investigators. As one defanged EPA veteran told me for the American Prospect Magazine last year, she felt like a like “a glamorized customer service worker—for industry.”

Worse still, Trump appointees throughout the EPA have turned even the process of documenting violations into a morass. Overall EPA inspections in Region 5 have dropped by 80 percent, from 4,706 in 2012 to 840 last year according to Better Government Association, an Illinois non-partisan watchdog group.

The critical veins of water systems

“One reason the EPA made a lot of progress in cleanups over the years was because we could go after polluters big and small,” Cantello said. “We used to be able to go inspect a site and file a violation. Now, the process creates weeks of delays and makes it so you’re only going for the cases that are way over the bar on pollution. You’re not as likely to pursue garden variety cases, even though small cases can still add up to lots of pollution.”

For Loreen Targos, “garden variety” translates into tributaries, canals, groundwater, and wetlands that play a role in a Great Lakes system containing 84 percent of North America’s surface fresh water and 21 percent of the surface fresh water on Earth. She knows this intimately as a Great Lakes remediation officer who has worked on major oil cleanups and who is also a Region 5 union steward.

She rattled off several places throughout the Midwest where pollution does not simply billow straight out from a lakeshore, but instead is found more inland from active and defunct industries that leave a toxic soup in channels, creeks, and estuaries. “These are the little veins that funnel into the lakes,” Targos said. “We can’t stop protecting them. If you listen to the president, it’s like, we don’t know where groundwater goes so we can’t do anything about it. But we have decades of watershed science that does tell us where it goes, even if you don’t see it.”

With just two months remaining before the rule goes into effect, and lawsuits on the way from environmental groups, it is likely that actual implementation of the Navigable Waters Rule will depend on who wins the November presidential election. The decline of EPA enforcement that has already occurred should serve as a harbinger of what is to come if this new rule dictates which water the government chooses to protect. In the end, the science is clear: toxins in the veins can still poison the heart of our water systems.

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Derrick Z. Jackson is a UCS Fellow in climate and energy and the Center for Science and Democracy. He is an award-winning journalist and co-author and photographer of Project Puffin: The Improbable Quest to Bring a Beloved Seabird Back to Egg Rock, published by Yale University Press (2015).

Featured image is from UCS

O líder ultraconservador, no intuito de desviar as atenções globais da magnitude de suas próprias ações, volta a tentar incluir a pandemia na conta chinesa, em meio à crescente guerra econômica contra este seu principal oponente geopolítico da atualidade. 

Contudo, a “investigação” que os EUA efetivamente deveriam realizar para, não só descobrir os “responsáveis” pela pandemia, mas evitar outras similares no futuro, não precisaria ir muito além de seu próprio país – talvez até a Europa Ocidental. 

Se suas intenções de resolver o problema fossem sérias, bastaria observar o que já foi pesquisado e comprovado por infinidades de cientistas naturais e historiadores ao longo das últimas décadas, e inclusive está relatado como “principal causa” da atual calamidade sanitária pela própria ONU: a destruição acelerada do meio ambiente por um capitalismo em crise que, nos obstáculos do caminho, perdeu suas últimas rédeas éticas.

A origem “animal” do coronavírus

A Organização Mundial da Saúde (OMS) declarou – e ora reafirmou – que um animal é a provável fonte de transmissão do novo coronavírus. E cientistas de variadas partes do mundo têm confirmado tal hipótese; embora não haja ainda consenso. 

Já o relatório “Fronteiras 2016: sobre questões emergentes de preocupação ambiental”, elaborado pelo Programa das Nações Unidas para o Meio Ambiente (PNUMA), afirma que os recorrentes surtos de zoonoses (transmissíveis de animais para humanos, como é o caso dos variados coronavírus), são reflexos da degradação ambiental intensa. 

Tais enfermidades estão em significativa ascensão nesse novo século; cenário que só piora, na medida em que os habitats silvestres são cada vez mais destruídos pela atividade humana. Nos últimos anos, várias doenças similares à COVID-19 se tornaram preocupação global por sua capacidade de causar pandemias, tais como ébola, gripe aviária, febre do Vale do Rift, ou zika vírus.

De acordo com o PNUMA, as zoonoses têm se imposto crescentemente como ameaças contundentes ao “desenvolvimento econômico, ao bem-estar animal e humano, e à integridade do próprio ecossistema” – em que todos habitamos. Em duas décadas estas enfermidades tiveram “custos diretos” de “mais de 100 bilhões de dólares”, o que poderia ter-se multiplicado (“vários trilhões de dólares”), caso tivessem efetivamente se tornado pandemias. Como agora… 

Para se evitar que surjam tais zoonoses, afirma o órgão da ONU, seria fundamental que “o homem” (leia-se com menos imprecisão: “a indústria capitalista”) freie suas múltiplas ameaças aos ecossistemas e à vida silvestre, reduzindo a agressão e fragmentação dos habitats de animais selvagens, bem como a poluição generalizada, e sobretudo estancando as mudanças climáticas. 

Controvérsias sobre a origem “espacial” do novo vírus

Quanto à origem “espacial” deste coronavírus, há ainda controvérsias. Controvérsias que seriam tolas, se não fossem justamente destinadas a tirar o foco do cerne do problema: a devastadora concorrência capitalista por sempre mais territórios e recursos naturais. 

Ambas as hipóteses que vêm sendo consideradas – que o vírus tenha surgido primeiro nos EUA, ou na China –, ainda que plausíveis, não mudam muito a constatação predominante: a de que a grande responsabilidade pela pandemia (questão que vai muito além da simples “origem do coronavírus”) é um sistema de produção desgovernado e agressivo que, em época de agudização da crise econômica global (crise estrutural do capitalismo, que se aprofunda desde 2008), desregula  temerariamente o metabolismo entre o homem e a natureza. 

Em outras palavras: o desequilíbrio do ecossistema planetário está em situação-limite; rapidamente se aproxima de um ponto de não-retorno, e isto abre espaço para que venham a ser recorrentes tais tipos de catástrofes sanitárias.

Portanto, a questão que deve ser colocada e equacionada, prioritariamente, não é a de se este vírus, em si, é resultado de mutação genética ou de má segurança em laboratórios de virologia (hipóteses possíveis e já verificadas na história), mas sim: como a comunidade internacional poderia fazer um esforço conjunto para reorientar o desenvolvimento de um mundo que, durante séculos de “modernidade”, vem sendo refém de um “progresso instrumental”, meramente “tecnológico”; falso “progresso”, pois não visa o “desenvolvimento social” e a “emancipação humana”, mas pelo contrário, é francamente voltado ao “crescimento dos lucros” (corporativos), através do cada vez mais intenso controle do homem e da natureza.

Se há cinco séculos, o filósofo Francis Bacon, entusiasmado com os incipientes avanços científicos – que começavam a chegar a uma Europa ainda periférica, atrasada e pobre –, definiu a função da ciência como sendo a “vitória sobre a natureza”, durante todo este tempo somente piorou esta visão rasa, controladora e sem perspectiva da “totalidade” complexa que compõe a vida social e natural. 

Conspirações são possíveis na geopolítica do vale-tudo

No início da epidemia, enquanto o surto ainda estava localizado na China, um Trump bonachão, quase com um sorriso, desdenhava da calamidade em descuidadas mensagens por redes sociais; enquanto seu Secretário de Comércio, Wilbur Ross, sem nenhuma vergonha, explicitava publicamente seu otimismo com o problema “chinês”, que se agravava, chegando até a declarar (digamos, com “pouco humanismo”) que o novo coronavírus: “ajudará a acelerar o retorno de empregos nos Estados Unidos”! 

No mês passado, já menos alegre, Trump mostrou por fim preocupação com o surto de coronavírus, denominando-o provocativamente de “vírus chinês” – à medida que via desabar as perspectivas econômicas de seu país.

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Ocorre que a pandemia, que já infectou mais de dois milhões de pessoas em todo o mundo e vem afetando violentamente a economia global (sobretudo a dos EUA, ameaçando sua posição geopolítica dominante desde a Segunda Guerra), tem a peculiaridade de ser em certo aspecto “democrática”, já que (apesar de ameaçar mais aos pobres e aos sem recursos, como toda doença) tem também atingido os ricos e poderosos. Este fato tem levado neoliberais convictos (mas com alguma racionalidade, o que não é o caso de terraplanistas e neofascistas afins) a se absterem de sua ambição por lucros velozes, optando pela paralisação econômica; não por sentimentos humanos, é claro, de que dispõem tão pouco, mas por projetarem prejuízos maiores em caso contrário. 

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O gesto intempestivo e xenófobo de Trump logo recebeu resposta – contundente! – do porta-voz do Ministério de Relações Exteriores da China, Zhao Lijian: “Pode ter sido o Exército estadunidense que levou a epidemia a Wuhan”. 

Em sua alegação, Lijian fazia referência a alguns curiosos episódios, ainda hoje não investigados a fundo:

i) Em outubro de 2019, teve lugar em Wuhan, os Jogos Olímpicos Mundiais Militares, com a participação de mais de 100 países; em reportagem, o jornalista estadunidense George Webb afirma que o piloto e ciclista militar Maatje Benassi teria levado o vírus à China em sua participação na competição; publicação do Departamento de Defesa dos EUA confirma que este atleta realmente participou de prova ciclística em Wuhan, pouco antes do começo da epidemia;

ii) De acordo com matéria do jornal The New York Times, o Pentágono detectou, no mesmo período, casos de coronavírus entre seus militares (que a princípio estariam atuando na Coreia do Sul e na Itália);

iii) Outro fato a ser investigado é o fechamento – por “falta de segurança” – de laboratório de “armas biológicas” no Centro Médico Militar Fort Detrick, em Maryland (EUA), que se dedicava a pesquisas sobre vírus, germes e doenças infecciosas, e encerrou suas atividades, em julho de 2019, alegadamente devido a problemas com o “descarte de materiais biologicamente perigosos”, e que inclusive teriam vazado, de acordo com o Centro de Controle e Prevenção de Doenças dos EUA (CDC).

O porta-voz chinês, em sua resposta, citou ainda o próprio diretor do CDC, Robert Redfield, que, recentemente questionado sobre se foram descobertas, postumamente, mortes por coronavírus nos Estados Unidos, respondeu: “Alguns casos foram, agora, realmente diagnosticados desse modo nos EUA”.

Suscitados pelo debate, diversos pedidos foram feitos aos EUA para que expusessem os exames de saúde de Benassi à época e realizassem novas provas, tornando esses dados públicos, com vistas a dirimir possíveis especulações e facilitar as investigações sobre a pandemia. 

Mas o governo Trump desconsiderou os pedidos por transparência (“transparência” que agora “exige” aos chineses). 

O terrorismo biológico tem história

Junte-se as peças, e está aberta interessante margem para se pensar que o misterioso “paciente zero” poderia ter sido um estadunidense, como afirma o repórter; e que portanto poderiam ter sido, não animais silvestres de um mercado chinês, mas competidores militares dos EUA – previamente contaminados – os responsáveis por fazer o vírus chegar a Wuhan: propositalmente ou não! 

E de fato, há exemplos infelizes na história que comprovam a plausibilidade da hipótese “proposital”. 

Por exemplo, durante a Guerra da Coreia, no âmbito da Guerra Fria, a União Soviética e a China acusaram os Estados Unidos de usar agentes biológicos contra a Coreia Popular; Washington, mais tarde, admitiu que havia estudos para produzir tais armas (!), mas que não foram usadas. 

Já em 1963, de acordo com documentos ora desclassificados (divulgados pelo Arquivo de Segurança Nacional dos EUA), a CIA – com apoio da própria Casa Branca – tentou contaminar com bacilos de tuberculose Fidel Castro, através do advogado-espião James Donovan, que então negociava com o comandante cubano a libertação de alguns mercenários ianques (fato que aliás já rendeu livros e filmes). 

Outro caso ocorreu logo após o fracasso da invasão da Baía dos Porcos, em Cuba, quando, com aval do governo de R. Kennedy, a CIA aliada à máfia dos EUA (veja-se episódio recentemente abordado pelo próprio cinema hollywoodiano), pôs em prática a famosa “Operação Mangusto”, que incluía entre suas ações o uso de agentes biológicos e químicos para destruição de colheitas cubanas e contaminação de camponeses. 

Dentre tantos outros exemplos, vale lembrar ainda a confissão de Eduardo Arocena, em 1984; este agente da CIA de origem cubana, em julgamento realizado em Nova Iorque, declarou à corte que a missão do grupo que ele chefiava era a de obter organismos infecciosos (patogênicos) e introduzi-los em Cuba – documento que consta em ata pública, mas que jamais foi investigado pelas autoridades “competentes” dessa nação-império. 

Não sendo a intenção deste artigo enveredar por esses tantos casos de “guerra suja” – que mostram a que níveis de baixeza o homem-moderno foi e é capaz em sua busca por lucros e poder –, fecha-se o “capítulo”, mencionando que, em julho de 2001, George W. Bush vetou um protocolo da ONU que visava dar mais poderes à Convenção Internacional sobre Armas Biológicas, argumentando que isso poderia causar interferências em “pesquisas legítimas” dos EUA. Na ocasião, especialista entrevistado pela BBC (Nicholas Sims, da London School os Economics) considerou tal atitude como “isolacionista”, obviamente vista como “obstáculo ao fortalecimento da Convenção”. Gesto que, portanto, desde então facilitou a possível disseminação de “vírus” enquanto armas de exterminação humana.

Considerando-se, no caso desta específica calamidade, que (na melhor das hipóteses) o vírus tenha se originado “naturalmente”, ou antes “ao acaso provocado” (motivado pela destruição do meio ambiente), voltamos então ao afirmado no início: a responsabilidade pela atual pandemia deve ser investigada no chamado “progresso moderno”; em seu falso “desenvolvimento”, meramente técnico, espetaculoso e controlador; em um mundo desregulado entregue aos desígnios dos interesses corporativos (sobretudo após a consolidação neoliberal nos anos 1980), e cuja capacidade autodestrutiva é conhecida ao menos desde a catástrofe da Primeira Guerra Mundial. 

[Continua…]

Yuri Martins-Fontes

Referências

https://www.globalresearch.ca/covid-1-toda-a-verdade-tem-tres-etapas/5707017

https://rebelion.org/la-cia-la-conexion-italiano-francesa-y-el-trafico-de-drogas-en-cuba-y-sudamerica/#sdfootnote23sym

https://operamundi.uol.com.br/politica-e-economia/43352/cia-cogitou-matar-fidel-com-equipamento-de-mergulho-infectado-com-bacilo-da-tuberculose

https://super.abril.com.br/blog/contaoutra/a-cia-apelou-ate-para-a-mafia-para-matar-fidel-castro/ (em que se cita o livro: Legado de Cinzas: uma História da CIA (Record), do jornalista Tim Weiner)

Early on April 27, the Israeli Air Force carried out a series of airstrikes on alleged Iranian targets in the countryside of Damascus. As always, pro-Israeli sources claimed that the missile attack hit and destroyed weapon depots and HQs of Hezbollah and Iranian forces. Syrian state media reported that 3 civilians were killed and 4 others wounded in the villages of Hujaira and Adliya as a result of the strike.

Tensions between Idlib militants and their Turkish sponsors and protectors have been growing since the last weekend.

On April 26, the Turkish Army clashed with Idlib radicals near their camp blocking the M4 highway near the town of Nayrab. At least 7 people were killed or injured, when Turkish forces opened fire at protesters blocking their column in the area.

According to pro-militant sources, Turkish troops tried to remove the protest camp from the area in order to expand the chunk of the highway used for joint patrols with the Russian Military Police. Another reason is the hostile posture of Idlib protesters towards Turkish troops deployed in the de-escalation area. Earlier in April, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham militants deployed at the highway and recorded a video threatening to behead Turkish soldiers. Ankara likely opted to give a lesson to its restive proxies.

However, the situation went out of control.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham militants shelled a Turkish observation post south of Nayrab with mortars injuring a Turkish soldier. He was evacuated by military helicopters to Turkey. The clashes continued with at least two drone strikes on Hayat Tahrir al-Sham positions near the village of San. Two militants were killed in the attack.

In response to Turkish actions, militants shelled Turkish MRAPs moving near Nayrab with heavy machine guns and reportedly launched anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) at a bulldozer and a battle tank of the Turkish Army. The impact of the ATGM strikes remains unclear.

These clashes became a visual demonstration that Idlib terrorists remain terrorists and are not ready to abandon their radical ideology and make concessions needed to propel Turkish interests. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and other al-Qaeda-linked groups receive funding, weapons and even direct military support, but put their own goals and plans first. So, all the while Turkey is pouring money and resources into the al-Qaeda-infested black hole.

The lack of loyalty among Idlib groups forces Turkey to extensively use its own troops to keep at least a semblance of control over the situation. Since the establishment of the new ceasefire regime in Idlib on March 5, the Turkish military has reportedly sent 2,810 military and logistical vehicles to the region. Pro-militant sources claim that approximately 10,000 Turkish troops are deployed in Greater Idlib.

The Syrian Army and security forces are conducting an extensive security operation in the province of al-Suwayda.

Government forces neutralized a criminal gang in the town of Salkhad seizing a large number of fire arms, ammunition, hand grenades and improvised explosive devices. Despite this, the gang leader, Nawras al-Eid, was able to flee. Pro-government sources claim that some local armed groups posing as the local self-defense forces are in fact criminal organizations.

The relative stabilization of the situation in southern and central Syria allowed the Damascus government to allocate additional resources to combat this organized crime. Nonetheless, if large-scale military hostilities once again resume in western or northeastern Syria, organized crime will have another chance to lift up its head in the relatively calm areas.

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The phrase ‘Yellow Peril’ – pertaining to the alleged threat of the Far East – was coined by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany in the 1880s after he had a dream featuring a Buddha riding a dragon threatening to invade Europe. It’s unclear whether Donald Trump has experienced a similar premonition during his lifetime but one thing is certain: he leads an administration which has been intent on escalating tensions with China, even prior to the outbreak of coronavirus.

It was just a matter of time before the blame game would begin. Donald Trump has long viewed China as an economic adversary. On the presidential campaign trail in 2016 he was accusing China of ‘raping’ the US and that the nation was responsible for the ‘the greatest theft in the history of the world’. The rhetoric has not changed much since then. Trump vigorously pursued his trade war with China in 2018 when he literally ‘ordered’ US companies to cease trading with the east asian nation. The President has attempted to influence policy beyond its borders too; pressurizing the UK not to embark on a deal with Huawei, the Chinese mobile phone network provider, to set up 5G across Britain. The US has never disguised its hatred of the firm, launching its own special vendetta against it, including the organisation of the arrest of the Huawei founder’s daughter and Chief Financial Officer in Canada in 2018.

The coronavirus pandemic has therefore provided the perfect catalyst to a war which began much earlier against China (see John Pilger’s film The Coming War with China). The main difference before was that the US was pretty much on its own. The UK for its part had been courting China for years, trying to be its ‘best friend in the West’ so as to encourage inward investment. Not any more, the Tory hawks say now. According to Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab there will be ‘no more business as usual with China’. He has promised a ‘deep dive review’ as to how coronavirus was able to spread from China. And he’s not alone.  Last week a new Conservative China Research Group was founded with the goal of reassessing Britain’s future relationship with the country. There’s to be a completely new approach.  A senior Conservative MP told the FT:

“The pressure from our MPs and the public to punish China is huge. They are going to be blamed for the worst effects of this pandemic and we will have to shift our foreign policy to be more aligned to [US president Donald] Trump’s’.

And therein lies the rub.  For Trump’s posse aren’t holding back when it comes to threats against China. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has already warned he will ‘make China pay’ for the Covid-19.

Trump lays full responsibility at Beijing’s door for the outbreak, despite how effectively the nation of 1.4 billion people has managed the crisis. (Through a range of measures, including strict quarantine and thorough testing it has drastically reduced the number of cases across the country, with the city of Wuhan, the official source of the virus, back open for business.)  The US needs a scapegoat now; more to the point Donald Trump needs a distraction if he is to have any chance of winning the next election.

But for the UK to go along with any such aggressive policy against China is ludicrous at a time like this when the world ought to be pulling together. The British security services announced last week they would begin their ‘investigation’ into precisely where the coronavirus originated, focusing on the laboratory in Wuhan, which, it has been speculated, the virus could have escaped from before appearing at the fish market (the location that was first publicised as being the source of the outbreak).

However the reality is we have no evidence that the virus has any connection with the Wuhan laboratory.  Further still, there is scientific evidence to indicate that the disease did not originate in Wuhan at all, but in southern China.

Cambridge scientists have carried out research suggesting that coronavirus may be months older than originally thought and did not come from the fish market. Peter Forster, a geneticist at the University of Cambridge said that the virus may have mutated into its final ‘human-efficient’ form months ago, but stayed inside a bat or other animal or even human for several months without infecting other individuals.’ Even more interestingly, Forster said that if pressed, he ‘would say the original spread started more likely in southern China than in Wuhan.’ The idea that Wuhan is not the original source  is backed up by Chinese reports which now state the first case of coronavirus can be traced back to Hubei province, not Wuhan, in December 2019.

‘I listen to the scientists’ UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson keeps saying. Well, surely this is the one time when our conclusions must be led by the scientific evidence. Or will we dance to the tune of President Trump, whose understanding of science begins and ends with the possibility of injecting people with disinfectant to treat Covid-19? We cannot allow this pandemic to be used as an excuse for waging a war, whether hot or cold, against China. Such thinking belongs, and should stay in the 19th century. Enough people have suffered as a consequence of this pandemic already. China as a nation, wants to be successful, wants to have a thriving economy and is extremely proud. If provoked, despite not having a history of invading other countries, one can be sure it will defend itself to the hilt.

‘Handle with care’ says the label on the package I just ordered from China. That says it all really, doesn’t it?…

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Johanna Ross is a journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Featured image is from FinanceTwitter

In December 1917, Europe was immersed in the First World War—one of the most vicious, insane wars the world had ever witnessed. After learning about the high casualty toll and the horrific nature of trench warfare, which included the use of poison gas, Britain’s prime minister, David Lloyd George, confided in a private conversation to C. P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian:

“If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course, they don’t know, and can’t know.” 

Just over a century later, here we are, yet again, immersed in a global war. However, this war, which is ostensibly sold to all of us as a battle to “stop the spread of the coronavirus,” is in reality a war devised by “the powers-that-shouldn’t-be” to remove the last remnants of humanity’s inherent freedoms and liberties.

And, just like all of the previous criminal wars throughout human history—the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and every other subsequent conflict—if people around the world knew the truth about this war, it would come to a screeching halt overnight.

Through all of my years of research in matters relating to war, I have come to understand one very important thing: When human societies lose their freedom, it’s usually not because the monarch, the state, or some dictator has overtly taken it away. Rather, it is lost because too many people willingly surrender their freedom in return for protection from some perceived (real or imagined) menace.

That menace is typically manufactured by the state and is designed to stir up such a torrent of fear in the mind of citizens that they pressure their politicians to implement measures against the fabricated threat.

Unfortunately, it rarely occurs to the public to ask:

Are we simply reacting to an orchestrated threat?

Will the protective measures we’re demanding of our leaders actually work?

Or will “the cure” being offered to us be worse than “the disease”?

Sadly, we seem to have not learned from history that, once the state is asked by the citizenry to respond to a danger, it will do so with a drastic course of action—with rights-restricting rules that will never be removed once imposed. This is exactly how societies become despotisms. 

To be sure, there is a seasonal influenza, a coronavirus, currently sweeping around the world, just as the flu does every year, like clockwork. And, yes, this particular coronavirus seems to pose a serious health hazard to the elderly and to anyone with underlying medical issues. However, one crucial question has being avoided by officials and the public alike: Is this outbreak of an infectious disease called COVID-19 serious enough to warrant the draconian countermeasures that all governments—with the exception of Sweden—have initiated?

Those counteractions have done a number on communities everywhere:

• collapsing local economies and, in a ripple effect, the world economy
• sending millions upon millions of people to the unemployment line
• imprisoning millions of honest, hard-working citizens in their homes
• bankrupting countless mid-size and small businesses (and destroying the dreams and livelihoods of their owners)
• bringing out of the woodwork rules-obsessed busybodies who take delight in snitching on neighbours and strangers alike for not “social distancing”
• unearthing every petty tyrant whose main mission in life is to ensure that every mask-less person is arrested and carted off to jail
• policing quarantined areas with drones
• tracking and surveilling all human beings who are ambulatory and have cell phones (if ants carried mobile phones into and out of their mounds, they’d doubtless be subject to  triangulation tracking)
• increasing stress and the incidence of flaring tempers among the homebound, which has resulted in a sharp escalation of domestic violence
• saddling future generations with massive debt that can lead debtors into deep depression, permanent homelessness, possible suicide 

Medical professionals are observing the entire state of affairs with increasing alarm. They are questioning the official coronavirus infection rates and noting the detrimental effects of the lockdown. Examples abound.

Take Dr. Erickson, co-owner of Accelerated Urgent Care in Kern County, California, who, with his partner, Dr. Massihi, has gone on record saying that, in contrast to the high numbers of people contracting this coronavirus, there has been only “a small amount of death . . . similar to what we have seen every year with the seasonal flu.”

Stanford University epidemiologist and professor of medicine John Ioannidis has made the same observation. In an April 17 interview, Dr. Ioannidis he claimed that “COVID-19 has an infection fatality rate that is in the same ballpark as seasonal influenza.” Moreover, he said, the devastation and deaths caused by the imposed lockdown on the entire world economy “can be far worse than anything the coronavirus can do.” Based on a study he conducted, Dr. Ioannides said that “the data collected so far on how many people are infected and how the epidemic is evolving are utterly unreliable.”

Indeed, we have seen ample evidence of this “utterly unreliable” data—less euphemistically known as manipulated data—coming out of Italy. Professor Walter Ricciardi, scientific advisor to Italy’s minister of health, referred to a report produced by the Italian COVID-19 Surveillance Group and observed that “only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity—many had two or three.” The report cited by Prof. Ricciardi pointed out that half of the patients who died had three or more other underlying diseases at the time of death.

In the United States, meanwhile, the death toll figures attributed to the virus are no more accurate. Doctors are being told to write on death certificates that the cause of death is “presumed” to be COVID-19 or that COVID-19 “contributed” to the death, when, in fact, there is absolutely no proof that COVID-19 caused the death, nor did any lab test indicate a COVID-19 positive.

The United Nations’ Geneva-based World Health Organization (WHO), which has been entrusted to be an impartial global health guardian, has proven itself no better than national governments at truthfully disseminating critical information. WHO’s questionable statistics on COVID-19 only serve to cement its reputation as an organization that, since 2009, has been plagued by corruption, conflict-of-interest scandals linked to Big Pharma, and a lack of transparency. Few citizens are familiar with the WHO’s transgressions, and even fewer understand how it is financed.

So let me briefly explain the latter. The WHO’s principal advisory group for vaccines and immunization is called the Scientific Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE). This team of so-called “experts” is dominated by individuals who receive significant funding from either the major vaccine makers, from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, or from Wellcome Trust. In his informative article, “Can We Trust the WHO?” author F. William Engdahl writes that, in the latest posting by WHO:

“. . . of the 15 scientific members of SAGE, no fewer than 8 had declared interest, by law, of potential conflicts. In almost every case the significant financial funder of these 8 SAGE members included the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Merck & Co. (MSD), Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance (a Gates-funded vaccine group), BMGF Global Health Scientific Advisory Committee, Pfizer, Novovax, GSK, Novartis, Gilead, and other leading pharma vaccine players.”

Moreover, unlike in its early years, when the WHO was primarily funded by UN member governments, today it receives funding from a “public-private partnership,” which vaccine companies dominate. The WHO’s financial audit for 2017 indicates that by “far the largest private or non-governmental funders of WHO are the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation together with the Gates-funded GAVI Vaccine Alliance, the Gates-initiated Global Fund to fight AIDS.” That year, the Gates Foundation alone donated a staggering $324,654,317 to the WHO, second only to the US government, which contributed $401 million. According to statistics posted in 2018, “the second-largest funder after the US government is still the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which provides 9.8 per cent of the WHO’s funds.” 

In light of these relationships, it is not surprising that WHO data on COVID-19 has been found to contain repeated errors—false positives—and inconsistencies, all of which it refuses to correct. As a result, Oxford University and various countries have ceased using WHO data on coronavirus infection rates.   

Because of the inaccurate and incomplete data that WHO has been collecting from around the world, we will never know exactly how many people have died from the virus. 

Of course, in order to successfully prosecute their war on our civil liberties, these global overlords must maintain a monopoly on the information that shapes their official narrative.

If they were to release videos of empty hospitals or reveal the very low mortality rates actually associated with the virus, they would not be able to foster the element of fear required to keep the public credulously accepting their every pronouncement and obeying their every edict. It is this single factor of fear, fomented by false information emanating from “trusted sources,” which is the vital element our health-state/police-state nannies rely upon as they deliberately, calculatingly fan the flames of the collective hysteria that has engulfed the world.

Why do I say “deliberately, calculatingly”? Because, by now, most readers have undoubtedly seen the smoking gun proof that the COVID-19 pandemic is in fact a plandemic. That smoking gun took the form of a simulation exercise called Event 201.

More aptly termed a drill, Event 201 was held in mid-October of last year, just weeks before the reports of the first recorded case of a contagious novel coronavirus disease starting seeping out of Wuhan, China. Sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the John Hopkins Center for Health, and the World Economic Forum, this tabletop exercise simulated “a series of dramatic, scenario-based facilitated discussions, confronting difficult, true-to-life dilemmas associated with response to a hypothetical, but scientifically plausible, pandemic.” That its sponsors have the gall to insist there is no connection between their exercise (I mean “drill”) and the near-simultaneous unrolling of the actual “live” event (dubbed COVID-19) speaks to their hubris—and their hypocrisy.

At best, maybe 10 percent of the entire simulation was devoted to actually helping people infected with the coronavirus. The remainder of the exercise was concerned with how officials would disseminate information and maintain all-important control of the official narrative—including the statistical narrative. Predictably, the participants discussed strategies for how to silence the misinformation and disinformation that would surely spread in the wake of this “hypothetical” pandemic. In other words, they were super-intent on shutting down any and all information, whether leaked or hacked or accidentally discovered, that was not sanctioned by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), by WHO officials, and by MSM corporate stenographers.

Key talking points included an elaborate plan of action for governments that would enable them to work in cooperation with social media giants like Facebook and Google and Twitter. Specifically, governments were told how they could troll social media sites and request that any voices countering the official narrative be removed; how they could silence independent journalists, while elevating their own so-called “authoritative voices”; and how they could join forces with Big Pharma companies like Johnson & Johnson to develop a vaccine to ward off the coronavirus .

What happened to the action plan when it was applied to the on-its-heels real-life scenario? Unsurprisingly, it was fully implemented and made fully operational. So, thanks to Event 201’s meticulous pandemic planning and WHO’s replication of it, the power of the police state is rising to unprecedented levels. Our global overlords and their CDC and WHO and MSM lackeys have succeeded in generating fear in the planet’s populace. This pandemic panic has, in turn, caused people to voluntarily, though unwittingly, surrender their hard-won freedoms. These freedoms are articulated in the constitutions of countries around the world, including the US Constitution, with its Bill of Rights—notably the First Amendment. These documents are now nothing more than meaningless pieces of paper. They may as well be blank.

A few for instances: Facebook is removing all voices that counter the official COVID-19 narrative from its platform. Google is monitoring (read: snooping) to check up on whether people are “social distancing.” The Clinton Global Initiative is promoting another Orwellian concept called “contact tracing” (read: total government surveillance grid), which involves monitoring, tracing, and, if need be, quarantining the entire US population. The plan is being sold to the American population as a critical component of a universal healthcare system, when, in reality, if implemented, it will be nothing more than a marketing ploy to disguise the arrival of George Orwell’s 1984.

Throughout the US, companies like VSBLTY and public-private partnerships are spreading a ubiquitous surveillance network of CCTV cameras with the ability to measure heartbeat and social distancing without any legal or legislative restraint—a true police state dystopia.

Power-grabbing governments the world over have locked down their societies and are dreaming up legislation to stop the spread of “dangerous misinformation” about the pandemic. British MP Damian Collins, for one, is calling for just such measures to silence free speech in the UK. In Canada, Privy Council President Dominic LeBlanc has admitted that the Canadian government is “considering introducing legislation to make it an offence to knowingly spread misinformation that could harm people.”

Not to be outdone, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has announced the creation of “a new United Nations Communication Response initiative to flood the Internet with facts and science while countering the growing scourge of misinformation.” In addition, the Secretary- General, like Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and various other leaders, is advising us precisely where to place our trust: in vaccines.

Vaccines are not the answer. If the mandatory vaccination agenda is ever implemented by these globalist kingpins, the coup against our fundamental rights and freedoms will be complete. Our governments—or, more likely, a one world government!—will force-vaccinate us with our own unique digital ID and chip that, once in place, will further heighten their surveillance of and tighten their control over all human beings. At that point, the police state will be complete and will be here to stay.

Contrary to what Trudeau believes, the way that governments have implemented oppressive edicts to combat the hyped virus is not the “new-normal.” Their actions are hardly normal, whether old or new.

Precisely the opposite is true: This is the forever abnormal.

Abnormal because, whether the virus was developed in a bioweapons lab or if it is the annual seasonal influenza, it is a manufactured crisis designed to infuse us with fear, induce us to willingly surrender our freedoms, and steer us away from seeing the ever-scarier, underlying agenda of a technocratic takeover by the New (or Flu!) World Order. (Think AI, 5G, Internet of Things, digital body chips, Data Fusion Centers, the NSA’s Project Prism, ad infinitum).

This collective insanity will come to an end only if we all leave behind the MSM nest of lies and seek out sources—independent online and in-print investigative journalists like James Corbett, F. William Engdahl, Derrick Broze, Ryan Cristián, Patrick Wood, Jon Rappoport, and countless others—who have been probing for (and finding and relaying) the truth about world events for anywhere from a decade to several dozen years. We must cease buying into propaganda and accept only provable facts from dependable sites—the ones that are called “fake news” by the real fakers and fearmongers.

To men like David Lloyd George and his ilk, we reply: Yes, we will learn the truth, and with this knowledge we will stop the war on our liberty and our lives!  

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David Skripac has a Bachelor of Technology degree in Aerospace Engineering. He served as a Captain in the Canadian Forces for nine years. During his two tours of duty in the Air Force he flew extensively in the former Yugoslavia as well as in Somalia, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Djibouti. 

The 9/11 Consensus Panel mourns the loss of the great Italian journalist, Giulietto Chiesa, whose life was devoted to upholding the foundations of democracy, not just in his native Italy, but in Russia and worldwide.

The Consensus Panel was honoured to have Giulietto as a voluntary reviewing member of its evidence-based 9/11 research – from 2011 until its findings were published in 2018.

In 1999-2000 Chiesa had founded the association Megachip – Democracy in Communications, which presents critical analysis of how the mainstream media actually works. By April 2009 its website had over 60 million hits, and by 2010 it had reached 100 million.  On the website appeared the words:

A whisper was enough to create a wave.

A simple whisper,

Nothing compared to the incessant noise of the thousand media that surround us.

Yet it was enough.

From Megachip sprang the 2008 documentary Zero: An Investigation Into 9/11, which challenged many assumptions surrounding the 9/11 attacks. Featuring such luminaries as Gore Vidal and Nobel Prize winner Dario Fo, it has been seen by millions of people.  The Italian daily newspaper, Il Corriere de da Sera, described the “sequence of contradictions, gaps, and omissions of stunning gravity” that it exposed in the official story.

In 2003, just before the American invasion of Iraq, he promoted – together with a large group of volunteering journalists – the experimental independent satellite TV project, NoWar TV.

From the late 1990s onwards Chiesa had covered issues related to globalization, in particular how they affect the world media system. This led to his involvement in the foundation of the global think tank, the World Political Forum, based in Turin and chaired by Mikhail Gorbachev.  In 2010 Gorbachev founded the New Policy Forum in Luxemburg, placing Chiesa on the Advisory Board.

Chiesa also served for 19 years as a Moscow correspondent, was a former member of the European Parliament, and was a Fellow of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies.

He was the Chief Editor of the web TV, Pandora TV.  His Il Fatto Quotidiano blog was among the top ten political blogs in Italy. He was deeply mourned and honoured at Megachip.

Giulietto Chiesa was clearly a diverse man whose immense energy and compassion drove a lifelong quest for democracy.  In the words of 9/11 Consensus Panelist Dr. Graeme MacQueen, co-founder of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University, “I found him to be extremely kind and generous…it was a great honour to have known him; we have lost a brave companion. What a loss.”

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Welcome to “Coronavirus in Context.”

Today we’re going to talk about whether we’re managing coronavirus correctly; do we need to think about a change in our treatment regiments?

My guest is Dr Cameron Kyle-Sidell. He’s a physician trained in emergency medicine and critical care, and he practices at Maimonides in Brooklyn, New York. Welcome, Dr Sidell.

Below is the full transcript.

John Whyte, MD, MPH: Hello. I’m Dr John Whyte, chief medical officer at WebMD. Welcome to “Coronavirus in Context.” Today we’re going to talk about whether we’re managing coronavirus correctly; do we need to think about a change in our treatment regiments? My guest is Dr Cameron Kyle-Sidell. He’s a physician trained in emergency medicine and critical care, and he practices at Maimonides in Brooklyn, New York. Welcome, Dr Sidell.

Cameron Kyle-Sidell, MD: Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me.

Whyte: You’ve been talking a lot about the number of patients, the percentage of patients dying on ventilators. When did you first notice this trend?

Kyle-Sidell: In preparation of opening what became a full COVID-positive intensive care unit, we scoured the data just to see what was out there—those who have experienced it before us, primarily the Chinese and the Italians; it was hard to find exactly, like the rate of what we call successful extubation—meaning, someone was put on a ventilator and taken off. And that data are still hard to find. I imagine there are a lot of people still on ventilators. But from the data we have available, it appears to be somewhere between 50% and 90%. Most published data puts it around 70%. So, that’s a very, very high percentage in general, when one thinks of a medical disease.

Whyte: You’ve been talking on social media; you say you’ve seen things that you’ve never seen before. What are some of those things that you’re seeing?

Kyle-Sidell: When I initially started treating patients, I was under the impression, as most people were, that I was going to be treating acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), similar in substance to AIDS, which I saw as a fellow. And as I start to treat these patients, I witnessed things that are just unusual. And I’m sure doctors around the country are experiencing this. In the past, we haven’t seen patients who are talking in full sentences and not complaining of overt shortness of breath, with saturations in the high 70s. It’s just not something we typically see when we’re intubating some of these patients. That is to say, when we’re putting a breathing tube in, they tend to drop their saturations very quickly; we see saturations going down to 20 to 30. Typically, one would expect some kind of reflexive response from the heart rate, which is to say that usually we see tachycardia, and if patients go too low, then we see bradycardia. These are things that we just weren’t seeing. I’ve seen literally a saturation of zero on a monitor, which is not something we ever want and something we actively try to avoid. And yet we saw it, and many of my colleagues have similarly seen saturations of 10 and 20. We try to put breathing tubes in to avoid this very situation. Now, these patients tend to desaturate extremely quickly, so these situations have occurred. Still, what we’re seeing—that there was no change in the heart rate—is just unusual. It’s just something that we are not used to seeing.

Whyte: This is more like a high-altitude sickness. Is that right?

Kyle-Sidell: Yes. The patients in front of me are unlike any patients I’ve ever seen., and I’ve seen a great many patients and have treated many diseases. You get used to seeing certain patterns, and the patterns I was seeing did not make sense. This originally came to me when we had a patient who had hit what we call our trigger to put in a breathing tube, meaning she had displayed a level of hypoxia of low oxygen levels where we thought she would need a breathing tube. Most of the time, when patients hit that level of hypoxia, they’re in distress and they can barely talk; they can’t say complete sentences. She could do all of those and she did not want a breathing tube. So she asked that we put it in at the last minute possible. It was this perplexing clinical condition: When was I supposed to put the breathing tube in? When was the last minute possible? All the instincts as a physician—like looking to see if she tires out —none of those things occurred. It’s extremely perplexing. But I came to realize that this condition is nothing I’ve ever seen before. And so I started to read to try to figure it out, leaving aside the exact mechanism of how this disease is causing havoc on the body, but instead trying to figure out what the clinical syndrome looked like.

Whyte: You talked a little about the data from Italy.

Kyle-Sidell: Yes.

Whyte: [From Luciano] Gattinoni. Were you aware of what was going on in Italy before you noticed these observations or did that come after the fact?

Kyle-Sidell: That came a little bit after. And I wasn’t aware. I can’t even remember the exact timeline. But in my reading, I came upon decompression, pulmonary sickness, which is essentially the bends—when divers dive and come up too quickly—which seemed to mirror the clinical picture of these patients. And in discussions of other people, it came up that they do appear similar clinically. This is not to say that the pathophysiology underlying it is similar, but clinically they look a lot more like high-altitude sickness than they do pneumonia. Regarding, Gattinoni, he published something on March 20th, which was about 2 days before I opened the ICU. I don’t know that I read it then, but somehow it got passed around. In my mind, by the time I read what he was saying, I’d come under the impression that this just wasn’t what we were used to seeing. It was a high-compliance disease, which every pulmonologist had. Anyone managing a ventilator can see. That’s not a question. So when I read his stuff, where he is suggesting that the management strategy that we use is essentially somewhat flipped, at least in these high-compliant patients, it just became more clear that that if we operate under a paradigm whereby we are treating ARDS in these high-compliant patients, we may not be operating under the right paradigm.

Whyte: Have you changed your protocols, then?

Kyle-Sidell: To be honest, I’ve run into a great deal of resistance within my institution, which is not to say that anyone is trying to stymie the progress at all. These are the protocols that are in every major (and minor) hospital.

Whyte: You talked about in your videos.

Kyle-Sidell: Yeah.

Whyte: Against a long-standing dogma. So what’s been the response from your clinical colleagues as well as hospital administrators?

Kyle-Sidell: I started to try to not my own protocols, but to treat patients as I would have treated my family, with different goals—which is to say, ventilation. However, these didn’t fit the protocol, and the protocol is what the hospital runs on with the respiratory therapist, with the nurses; everyone is part of the team. We ran into an impasse where I could not morally, in a patient-doctor relationship, continue the current protocols which, again, are the protocols of the top hospitals in the country. I could not continue those. You can’t have one doctor just doing their own protocol. So I had to step down from my position in the ICU, and now I’m back in the ER where we are setting up slightly different ventilation strategies. Fortunately, we’ve been boosted by recent work by Gattinoni, which was formally published today and which does outline the best evidence, based on at least expert recommendations, for changes in our overall protocols. [Editor’s note: Dr Kyle-Sidell is referring to an unedited proof, soon to be published formally in Intensive Care Medicine.]

Whyte: Can you tell us what some of those changes are that you’re going to make?

Kyle-Sidell: First, I’ll describe what Gattinoni was saying, which is that really what we’re seeing in ARDS are two different phenotypes: one in which the lungs display what you call high compliance, low elastance; and one in which they have low compliance and high elastance. To say it simply for people who are not pulmonologists, if you think of the lungs as a balloon, typically when people have ARDS or pneumonia, the balloon gets thicker. So not only do you lack oxygen, but the pressure and the work to blow up the balloon becomes greater. So one’s respiratory muscles become tired as they struggle to breathe. And patients need pressure. What Gattinoni is saying is that there are essentially two different phenotypes, one in which the balloon is thicker, which is a low-compliance disease. But in the beginning they display high compliance. Imagine if the balloon is not actually thicker but thinner, so they’d suffer from a lack of oxygen. But it is not that they suffer from too much work to blow up the balloon. As far as how we’re going to switch, we’re going to take our approach differently from the traditional ARDSnet protocol in that we are going to do an oxygen-first strategy: We’re going to leave the oxygen levels as high as possible and we’re going to try to use the lowest pressures possible to try to keep the oxygen levels high. That’s the approach we’re going to do, so long as the patients continue to display the physiology of a low elastance, high-compliance disease.

Whyte: Do you feel that somewhere the world made a wrong turn in treating COVID-19?

Kyle-Sidell: I don’t know that they made a wrong turn. I mean, it came so fast. I think that one thing we benefit from is that the Chinese and the Italians were hit first and they were hit hard. New York is being hit so hard. It’s hard to switch tracks when the train is going a million miles an hour. In that sense, we’d benefit from their shared experience. And I think it’s important that we listen to that experience. But I do think that it starts out with knowing, or at least accepting the idea, that this may be an entirely new disease. Because once you do that, then you can accept the idea that perhaps all the studies on ARDS in the 2000s and 2010s, which were large, randomized, well-performed, well-funded studies, perhaps none of those patients in those studies had COVID-19 or something resembling it. It allows you to move away from a paradigm in which this disease may fit and, unfortunately, walk somewhat into the unknown.

Whyte: You’re advocating something a little different. What are the consequences of you being wrong, albeit well intentioned?

Kyle-Sidell: Right now we have some of the greatest experts in the world giving their opinions. By that, I mean the Italians and Dr Gattinoni. I certainly could be wrong. What I’m asking for is not even not an immediate change in the ventilation strategy, because I’m critical care trained, I’m not pulmonary trained and I’m not as experienced as many around the country and many in my own hospital. But what I would like to see is all of these great minds get together. If they can accept this notion that perhaps we need to switch paradigms, and they’re able to better create a path forward that fits the disease. I would gladly follow them. Really, what I’m asking and what I’m requesting is that all of the experts in the field get together and perhaps come up with some fresh recommendations.

Whyte: You’ve been active on social media, as I mentioned. Are you a whistleblower?

Kyle-Sidell: This is sort of my first foray into social media. I don’t know that I’m a whistleblower. I don’t know that anyone was trying to purposely do any harm. I think that, all of the physicians involved and all of the nurses and everyone writing protocols—everyone is working as fast and as hard as they can with good faith and pure intention. For me, I saw something clinically that didn’t make sense. And seeing that New York is about 10 days ahead of the rest of country, I just felt compelled to get that information out.

Whyte: Has speaking up impacted your professional career?

Kyle-Sidell: I don’t know yet. In one sense, I have not felt qualms about it. For whatever reason, I trained in critical care and I was an ER doctor, and I think part of that allowed me to see it a little bit better. Because if you just received these patients in the ICU on breathing tubes, it’s very hard to see this physiology. I was running around the hospital from the ER to the floors to the ICU, and I saw them in all stages of this disease. When you see them in all those different stages, you’re able to see that something physiologically doesn’t make sense. So, in a way, I do feel that somehow my training and my position, being in New York City, allowed me to see this. I have not felt any conflict about coming forward, per se. And I don’t know what it will do for my career, but I hope that people know that I’m not doing this with any kind of— I’m not trying to stymie anything. It’s really that I’m doing what I think is right.

Whyte: What are the two things that we need to be doing right now to really address the mortality?

Kyle-Sidell: That goes back to your question of “if I am wrong.” We are desperate now in the sense that everything we are doing does not seem to be working. So we’ve reached a point that most other diseases have not reached, where many physicians are willing to try anything that may help because so little seems to be helping. One of the reasons I speak up, and I hope people at the bedside speak up, is that I think there may be a disconnect between those who are seeing these patients directly, who are sensing that something is not quite right, and those brilliant people and researchers and administrators who are writing the protocols and working on finding answers. The first thing to do is see if we can admit that this is something new. I think it all starts from there. I think we have the kind of scientific technology and the human capital in this country to solve this or at least have a very good shot at it. I think the second thing is that whatever collaboration we can do with those who came before us—and by that, I mean the Chinese and the Italians and the Egyptians and whoever else has experienced this—if there’s anything we can learn from them, I think we need to open up and be ready to receive their help.

Whyte: Dr Kyle-Sidell, I want to thank you for speaking up and sharing your story with us.

Kyle-Sidell: Thank you very much. I appreciate you allowing me to speak.

Whyte: I want to thank you for watching “Coronavirus in Context.” I’m Dr John Whyte.

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British bank HSBC has told customers in the UK that it will stop processing standing order payments to the Palestinian aid charity Interpal from next month.

The bank sent out letters earlier this month to account holders who make regular donations in support of the London-based charity, informing them any payments would stop on 17 May. It gave no reason for taking the action.

The move from HSBC will come as a particularly heavy and bitter blow to Interpal because it has been announced during Ramadan, when traditionally Muslims give far more than at any other period of the year.

Muslims donated more than £100m during Ramadan of 2016 alone, according to the UK Charity Commission.

Ibrahim Hewitt, chairman of the board of trustees of Interpal, told Middle East Eye:

“It is disappointing that a major bank would do this during Ramadan, which is so important for donors and our beneficiaries. But also during the coronavirus pandemic. No reason has been given, neither to the donors nor the charity. That is quite astonishing.”

Founded 25 years ago, Interpal is described on the Charity Commission’s website as “one of the leading British charities focusing on providing relief and development aid to Palestinians” in the West Bank, Gaza, and in refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan.

Many of the vulnerable people who have benefited from Interpal’s work over the last quarter century seem certain to suffer if donations cannot reach the charity.

Hewitt told MEE:

“The people we help are ordinary people struggling under siege to find the basic necessities for ordinary life.”

He said that Interpal tried to bring “a semblance of normality to an abnormal situation”.

Bank accounts shut down

HSBC, which is one of the world’s largest banks, has a record of closing down accounts, including those of prominent Muslim customers, without explanation, withdrawing banking facilities from a number of organisations and community leaders in 2014 and 2015.

Those affected included the Finsbury Park Mosque in London and Anas Altikriti, founder and CEO of the Cordoba Foundation, a think tank which says that it devotes itself to building bridges between Islam and the west.

At the time, HSBC said that the account closures had taken place in the context of a global review of its businesses conducted after it agreed to pay a $1.9bn fine to US authorities for allowing Latin American drugs cartels to use its banks to launder hundreds of millions of dollars.

It denied that the closures were based on race or religion.

Last night the bank confirmed to MEE that it will be stopping any standing order payments to Interpal.

An HSBC UK spokesperson said: “As part of a global bank, sometimes we may decide to prevent certain transactions, even if they are allowed under local laws. We recognise that some people may be disappointed with this decision, and we’re sorry for any inconvenience it may cause.”

MEE asked HSBC what reasons it had for taking this action and whether Interpal had made any specific action that brought on this decision.

MEE also asked why this decision was being announced around the time of Ramadan.

These questions were met with no response.

Interpal targeted by pro-Israel lobbyists

This is the first time that HSBC is thought to have taken action against Interpal.

However, as MEE reported last year, the charity has had other banking or donation processing facilities withdrawn.

At that time, UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), a pro-Israel lobbying group, claimed a role in the withdrawal of Interpal’s BT MyDonate and JustGiving services, and the withdrawal of credit card services.

UKLFI’s actions against Interpal were based on the US Treasury designation of Interpal as a terrorist organisation in 2003.

This followed charges that the group supported Hamas, the Palestinian resistance movement designated by the EU and US as a terrorist group.

While Canada and Australia follow the US terrorist designation of Interpal, many other countries and international organisations – including Britain and the United Nations – do not.

Interpal helps fund the UN Relief and Works Agency, which offers support to Palestinian refugees throughout the Middle East.

Investigations and libel cases

The UK Charity Commission investigated Interpal in the wake of the US designation and on two other occasions. Each time, it cleared the group of all allegations of illegal activity.

The third investigation insisted Interpal review their due diligence and monitoring processes as well as break off all ties with a group which the Charity Commission was concerned had links to Hamas.

The Charity Commission later confirmed that Interpal had complied.

Interpal has also won a series of libel cases. The first came against the Board of Deputies of British Jews in 2005 after it denounced Interpal as a terrorist organisation on its website.

The Jerusalem Post apologised to Interpal in 2006, while the Express newspaper paid damages to the charity in 2010 after claiming it was linked to Hamas.

Last year, the Daily Mail paid damages of £120,000 to Interpal and issued an apology which stated: “The Trustees assure us, and we accept, that neither Interpal, nor its Trustees, have ever been involved in or provided support for terrorist activity of any kind. We apologise to the Trustees for any distress caused.”

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Summary

After being attacked by monetarists and others for many decades, MMT and the idea that running government budget deficit is stabilizing instead of destabilizing are suddenly gaining applause from the parts of the political spectrum that long opposed MMT: the banking and financial sector, especially the Republicans. But what is applauded is in many ways something quite different than the leading MMT advocates have long supported.

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) was developed to explain the logic of running government budget deficits to increase demand in the economy’s consumption and capital investment sectors so as to maintain full employment. But the enormous U.S. federal budget deficits from the Obama bank bailout after the 2008 crash through the Trump tax cuts and Coronavirus financial bailout have not pumped money into the economy to finance new direct investment, employment, rising wages and living standards. Instead, government money creation and Quantitative Easing have been directed to the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sectors. The result is a travesty of MMT, not its original aim.

By subsidizing the financial sector and its debt overhead, this policy is deflationary instead of supporting the “real” economy. The effect has been to empower the banking sector, whose product is credit and debt creation that has taken an unproductive and indeed extractive form.

This can clearly be seen by dividing the private sector into two parts: The “real” economy of production and consumption is wrapped in a financial web of debt and rent extraction – real estate rent, monopoly rent and financial debt creation. Recognizing this breakdown is essential to distinguish between positive government deficit spending that helps maintain employment and rising living standards, as compared to “captured” government spending to subsidize the FIRE sector’s extraction and debt deflation leading to chronic austerity.

Origins and Policy Aims of MMT

MMT was developed to explain the monetary logic in running budget deficits to support aggregate demand. This logic was popularized in the 1930s by Keynes, based on his idea of a circular flow between employers and wage-earners. Deficit spending was seen as providing public employment and hence consumer spending to absorb enough production to enable the economy to keep producing at a profit. The policy goal was to maintain (or recover) reasonably full employment.

But production and consumption are not the entire economy. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) was formally developed in the 1990s, with roots that can be traced by Abba Lerner’s theory of functional finance, and by Hyman Minsky and others seeking to integrate the financial sector into the overall economic system in a more realistic and functional way than the Chicago School’s monetarist approach on the right wing of the political spectrum. A key point in its revival was Warren Mosler’s insight that a currency-issuing country does not “tax to spend”, but instead must spend before its citizens can pay tax in that currency.

MMT was also Post-Keynesian in the sense of advocating government budget deficits as a means of pumping purchasing power into the economy to achieve full-employment. Elaboration of this approach showed how such deficits created stability instead of the instability that results from private-sector debt dynamics. At an extreme, this approach held that recessions could be cured simply by deficit spending. Yet despite the enormous deficit spending by the U.S. and Eurozone in the wake of the 2008 crash, the overall economy continued to stagnate; only the financial and real estate markets boomed.

At issue was the role of government in the economy. The major opponents of public enterprise and infrastructure, of budget deficits and market regulation, was the financial sector. “Austrian” and Chicago-style monetary theorists strongly opposed MMT, asserting that government budget deficits would be inflationary, citing Germany’s Weimar inflation of the 1920s, and Zimbabwe, and portraying government deficits (and indeed, active government programs and regulation) as “interference” with “free markets.”

MMTers pointed out that running a budget surplus, or even a balanced budget, absorbed income from the economy, thereby shrinking demand for goods and services and leading to unemployment. Without government deficits, the economy would be obliged to rely on private-sector banks for the credit needed to grow.

That occurred in the United States in the final years of the Clinton administration when it actually ran a budget surplus. But with a public sector surplus, there had to be a corresponding and indeed identical private sector deficit. So the effect of that policy was to leave either private debt financing or a trade surplus as the only ways in which economic growth could obtain the monetary support that was needed. This built in structural claims for interest and amortization that were deflationary, ultimately leading to the political imposition of debt deflation and economic austerity after the 2008 debt crisis.

Republican and Financial Sector Opposition to Budget Deficits and MMT

If governments do not provide enough purchasing power by running budget deficits to enable the economy to grow, the role of providing money and credit will have to be relinquished to banks – at interest, and for purposes that the banks decide on (mainly, loans to buy real estate, stocks and bonds). In this respect banks are competitors with government over who will provide the economy’s money and credit – and for what purposes.

Banks want the government out of the way – not only regarding money creation, but also for financial and price policies, tax policy and laws governing corporate behavior. Finance wants to appropriate public monopolies, by taking payment in natural resources or basic public infrastructure when governments are, by policy rather than necessity, short of their own money, or of foreign exchange. (In times past, this required warfare; today foreign debt is the main lever.)

To get into this position, banks need to block governments from creating their own money. The result is a conflict between private bank credit and public money creation. Public money is created for social purposes, primarily to maintain production and consumption growth. But bank credit nowadays is created largely to finance the transfer of property and financial assets – real estate, stocks and bonds.

Opposing the Logic for running Budget Deficits

The Reagan-Bush administration (1981-82) ran budget deficits not to pay for social spending, but as a result of tax cuts, above all for real estate.[1]  The resulting budget deficit led to proposed “cures” in the form of fiscal cutbacks in social spending, starting with Social Security, Medicare and education. This aim became explicit by the Clinton Administration (1993-2000), and President Obama convened the Simpson-Bowles “National Commission on Budget Responsibility and Reform” in 2010. Its name reflects its recommendation that “responsibility” meant a balanced budget, which in turn required that social spending programs be rolled back.

Opponents of public spending programs saw the rise in government debt resulting from budget deficits as providing a political leverage to enact fiscal cutbacks in spending. Many Republicans and “centrist” Democrats had long sought a reason to scale back Social Security. Austrian and Chicago-School monetarists urged that government shrink its activity, privatizing as many of its functions as possible to let “the market” allocate resources – a largely debt-financed market whose resource and monetary allocation would shift away from governments to financial centers – from Washington to Wall Street, and in other countries to the City of London, the Paris Bourse and Frankfurt. However, no such critique was levied against military spending, and the government responded to the 2000 dot.com and 2008 junk-mortgage financial crises by enormous monetary subsidy and bailouts of the economy’s credit and asset sector.

The Obama and Trump Financial Bailouts as a Travesty of MMT

To advocates of MMT, and indeed to most post-Keynesian economists, the positive function of budget deficits is to spend money and therefore income into the economy. And by “the economy” is meant the production-and-consumption sector, not the financial and property markets. That “real” economy could have been saved in a number of ways. One way would have been to scale back mortgage debts (and debt service) to realistic market prices and rent rates. Another would have been simply to create monetary grants and subsidies to enable debtors to remain in their homes. That would have kept the financial system solvent as well as employment and existing home ownership rates.

But Obama double-crossed his voters by not rolling out bad mortgage debts and other obligations to realistic market prices, and instead bailing out the banks for credit creation in the form of bad loans (“liars’ loans” to NINJA borrowers, and bad financial bets on derivatives by brokerage firms that were designated as “banks” in order to receive Federal Reserve credit and bailouts. With bank balance sheets impairing their ability to create new credit, the government stepped in by creating its own credit. This gave the banks, shadow banks and other non-bank financial institutions a bonanza of credit – replete with the opportunity to buy up foreclosed homes and create rental properties This policy was organized by Blackstone, and turned the crisis into an opportunity to make enormous rates of return for its participants. The effect was to intensify the economy’s polarization, as investors typically needed a minimum $5 million tranche to join.

The Federal Reserve’s $4.6 trillion in Quantitative Easing did not show up as money creation, because it was technically a swap of assets – like Aladdin’s “new lamps for old, in this case “good credit for junk.” The effect of this swap was much like a deposit inflow. It enabled banks to ride out the downturn while making a killing in the stock and bond markets, and to lend for takeover loans and related financial speculation.

Wall Street’s Financial Capture of MMT To Inflate Asset Prices, Not Revive the Economy

At issue is how to measure “the economy.” For the wealthy One Percent, and even the Ten Percent, “the economy” is “the market,” specifically the market value of the assets that they own: their real estate, stocks and bonds. This property and financial wrapping for the “real” production-and-consumption economy has steadily risen in proportion to wages and industrial profits. It has risen largely by government money and credit creation (and tax breaks for property and finance), along with its economic rent, interest and financial charges and service fees, which are counted as part of Gross Domestic Product [GDP], as if they were actual contributions to the “real” economy.

So we are dealing with two economic spheres: the means of production, tangible capital and labor on the one hand (what is supposed to be measured by GDP), and the market for financial and property assets, along with their rentier charges that are taken from the income earned by this labor and real capital.

Financial engineering replaces industrial engineering – along with political engineering by lobbyists seeking tax breaks, rent-extraction privileges, and government subsidy. To increase property and financial asset prices and corporate behavior, companies are drawing on credit and government subsidy not to increase their production and employment, but to bid up their stock prices by share buyback programs and high dividend payouts. Buybacks are called “repaying capital,” so literally this policy is one of disinvestment, not investment. It is favored by tax laws (taxing “capital” gains at a lower rate or not at all, as compared to taxes on dividends).

The Blind Spot of Vulgarized MMT: The FIRE Sector vs. the “Real” Economy

Much superficial confusion between the FIRE sector and the production-and-consumption economy comes from repeating the over-simplification of classical monetary formula MV=PT, namely, dividing the economy into private and government sectors. Setting aside the balance of payments (the international sector), it follows that government spending will pump money into the domestic economy, and that conversely, budget surpluses will suck money out.

The problem is that this analysis, used by many MMTers, for instance, the Levy Institute’s typical chart, does not distinguish between government spending into the FIRE sector and asset markets as compared to spending into the “real” economy on employment and production (including the building of public infrastructure, for instance). Without this distinction it is not possible to see whether deficit spending is productive by aiming at supporting employment and output, or merely aims at supporting asset prices and making sure that creditors do not lose the value of their financial claims on debtors – claims that have become unpayable and thus are a bottomless pit of government deficit spending in the end.

Trying to keep the financial sector and its debt overhead afloat implies imposing austerity on the rest of the economy, IMF-style. So “MMT for Wall Street” is an oxymoron, and is the opposite of MMT for a full employment economy.

MMT, Public and Private Debt

Money is debt. Government money creation for public purposes – to pay for employment and output – spurs prosperity. But in its present form, private-sector debt creation has become largely extractive, and thus leads to the opposite effect: debt deflation.

Governments can pay public debt without defaulting, as long as this debt is denominated in their own domestic currency, because the governments can always print the money to pay. To the extent that public debt results from spending that supports output, employment and growth, this process is not inflationary. The government gives value to money by accepting it in payment of taxes. So the monetary system is inherently bound up with fiscal policy. The classical premise of such policy has been to minimize the economy’s cost structure by taxing mainly unearned income (economic rents), not wages and profits in the production-and-consumption sector.

The problem nowadays is private debt. Most such debt is created by banks. This bank credit – debts owed by bank customers – tends to increase faster than the ability of debtors to earn enough income to pay it. The reason is that most of private debt is not used for productive, income-generating purposes, but to finance the transfer property ownership (affecting asset prices in proportion to the rate of credit growth for such purposes). That use of credit – not associated with the production-and-consumption economy – leads to debt deflation. Instead of providing the economy with purchasing power (as in running government budget deficits), private debt works over time to extract interest and amortization from the economy, along with servicing fees.

The typical mortgage, including its interest charges ends up exceeding the value that the property seller received. As a result of compound interest, the mortgage debt is repaid several times to the bank. The effect is to make banks the main recipient of rental income (as mortgage debt service) and ultimately the main beneficiaries of “capital” gains (that is, asset-price gains).

What gives bank credit its monetary characteristics – and enables debt to be monetized as a means of payment – is the government’s willingness to treat banks as a public utility and guarantee bank deposits (up to a specified limit) and ultimately to guarantee bank solvency.

A budget deficit resulting from a financial bailout reflects the inability of the economy to carry its exponentially growing debt overhead. Because this overhead increases as a result of the mathematics of compound interest, the size of bailouts must increase – and with it, the budget deficit (plus swap agreements) to subsidize this debt overgrowth as an alternative to imposing losses by banks and financial investors.

That is what we have seen since the financial crisis of 2008, both in Europe and the United States. Led by the financial sector, much of the economic mainstream finally has come to embrace the idea of budget deficits – now that these deficits are benefiting primarily the financial and other parts of the FIRE sector, not the population at large, that is, not the “real” economy that was the focus of Keynesian economics and MMT.

This kind of endorsement for government money creation thus should not be considered an application of MMT, because its policy goal is almost diametrically opposite. Much as the Reagan-era budget deficits were used as the first part of a one-two punch to roll back social spending (Social Security, Medicare, education, etc.), so today’s Obama-Trump deficits are being used to warn that the economy must preserve fiscal “stability” by rolling back social programs in order to bail out the financial economy. Wall Street magically has become transmogrified into “the economy.” Labor and industry are viewed simply as deadweight expenditures on the financial sector and its attempted symbiosis with the central bank and Treasury.

The Financial Sector, Private Capital and Austerity and Central Planning

If Wall Street is bailed out once again at the expense of the “real” economy of production and consumption, America will have turned decisively away from democracy into a financial oligarchy. Ironically, the initial logic is the claim that an active state is inherently less efficient than the private sector, and thus should be shrunk (in the words of lobbyist Grover Norquist, “to a size so small that it can be drowned in a bathtub”). But relinquishing resource allocation to the financial sector leads to its product – that is, debt – creating a crisis that requires unprecedented government intervention to “restore order,” defined as saving banks and financial investors from loss. This can only be achieved by shifting the loss onto the economy at large.

Today, the financial sector – banks and financial investors – play the role that the landlord did in the 19^thcentury. Its land rents made Britain and continental Europe high-cost economies, as prices exceeded cost-value. That is what classical economics was all about – to bring market prices in lines with actual, socially and economically necessary costs of production. Economic rent was defined as unnecessary costs, which were merely payments for privilege: hereditary landownership, and monopolies that creditors had carved out of the public domain or won as legal compensation for financing public war debts.

The rentierclass not only was the major income recipient of the economic surplus, it controlled government, via the upper house – the House of Lords in Britain, and similar houses across continental Europe. Today, the Donor Class controls electoral politics in the United States, via the Citizens United ruling. Political office has become privatized, and sold to the highest bidders. And these are from the financial sector – from Wall Street and financialized corporations.

The post-2008 stock market and bond-market boom raised the DJIA from 8500 to 30,000. This gain was engineered by central bank support far in excess of what a “free market” would have priced stock at. Before QE, U.S. shares had fallen only slightly below the market average for the previous century. QE drove it to its highest level outside the 1929 and 2000 bubbles. Even after the Coronacrash, shares are still overpriced compared to pre-“Greenspan Put” prices.

The result is best thought of as a blister, not a bubble. Its only hope of surviving without bursting is for the government to continue to support it in the face of a drastically shrinking post-coronavirus economy.

So the question is what will be saved: The economy’s means of livelihood, or an oligarchy of predators living in luxury off this shrinking livelihood?

All this was explained by classical economists in their labor theory of value, which was designed to isolate economic rent and other non-production overhead charges (perceived to be mainly services in the 18^th and 19^th century, especially by the wealthy classes).

The Hudson Paradox: Money, Prices and the Rentier Economy

Without distinguishing between the FIRE sector and the “real” economy there is no way to explain the effects of government budget deficits on asset-price inflation and commodity-price inflation

Here is a seeming paradox. Bank credit is created mainly against collateral being bought on credit – primarily real estate, stocks and bonds. The effect of increasing loans against these assets is to raise their prices – mainly for housing, and secondarily for financial securities. Higher housing costs require new home buyers to take on more and more debt in order to buy a home. Their higher debt service leaves less disposable income to spend on goods and services.[2]

The asset-price inflation effect of money creation by banks is thus to exert a downward impact on commodity prices, to the extent that the carrying cost on bank credit reduces the net purchasing power of debtors to buy goods and services. This deflationary effect of bank money ends in a bad-debt crash, to which the government responds by bailing out the financial sector with a combination of money creation and central bank swaps (which do not appear as money creation). This is just the reverse of the MV = PT tautology, which only measures the volume of new money (M) without considering its use– what it is spent on. By failing to distinguish the use of bank credit to buy assets (hence, adding to asset-price inflation) as compared to government deficit spending, both the old monetary formulae and the frequent MMT contrast between public and private sectors neglect the need to distinguish the FIRE sector’s “wealth and debt” transactions from how wages and profits are spent in the production-and-consumption economy.

The commercial banking system’s “endogenous” money creation takes the form of credit at interest. The volume of this interest-bearing debt grows exponentially, absorbing and extracting more and more income from industry and labor. The effect on the overall economy is debt deflation.

It may be epitomized as

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day;

Teach him how to fish, and you lose a customer.

But give him a loan to buy a boat and net to fish, and he will end up paying you all the fishes he catches. You have a debt servant.

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Michael Hudson is a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His latest book is “and forgive them their debts”: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year

Dirk Bezemer is a Professor of Economics at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands..

Steve Keen is a Professor and  Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute for Strategy, Resilience and Security of University College London (www.isrs.org.uk). He blogs at www.patreon.com/profstevekeen

Sabri Öncü ([email protected]) is an economist based in İstanbul, Turkey

Notes

[1] Real estate was given a fictitiously short accelerated depreciation allowance – as if a building lost its entire value in just 7½ years, providing all rental income to be charged as an expense and even to generate a fictitious tax-accounting tax loss. This catalyzed the great conversion of rental properties to co-ops. Landlords (called “developers”) took out a mortgage equal to the entire market price of the building, and then sold apartments at a price not only greater than zero, but typically equal to the entire mortgage. It was one of the great “wealth creation” ploys in modern history. And it was left out of the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA), which used “realistic” depreciation – which still pretended that buildings were losing value, despite the maintenance and repair expenditures to prevent such loss.

[2] Higher stock and bond prices lower the yield of dividend income. (Most such income is spent on new financial assets, not goods and services, so the effect of lower yields probably is minimal, and may be offset by a “wealth effect” of higher asset prices and net worth.)

Last month Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey called for the bold and urgent launch of what he called “a Manhattan Project-type approach” to fight the coronavirus pandemic given the enormity of the health and economic impact, increasingly even harming US defense readiness.

Apparently there has been such a group operating behind the scenes, but very unlike the original Manhattan Project it’s a private sector initiative, funded by a tiny network of ultra-rich industry titans working closely with government contacts. Meet “the secret group of scientists and billionaires pushing Trump on a Covid-19 plan” profiled in a lengthy Wall Street Journal investigation Monday:

These scientists and their backers describe their work as a lockdown-era Manhattan Project, a nod to the World War II group of scientists who helped develop the atomic bomb. This time around, the scientists are marshaling brains and money to distill unorthodox ideas gleaned from around the globe.

They call themselves Scientists to Stop Covid-19, and they include chemical biologists, an immunobiologist, a neurobiologist, a chronobiologist, an oncologist, a gastroenterologist, an epidemiologist and a nuclear scientist. Of the scientists at the center of the project, biologist Michael Rosbash, a 2017 Nobel Prize winner, said, “There’s no question that I’m the least qualified.”

The until now secretive group is led by a 33-year-old physician-turned-venture capitalist, Tom Cahill, and is described as an elite go-between the pharmaceutical industry and Trump administration decision-makers, or an “ad hoc review board” of sorts pursuing cutting edge outside the box ideas.

The scientists include a dozen world renowned researchers, pathology experts and inventors closely networked at institutions ranging from The Scripps Research Lab in La Jolla, California, to Yale University School of Medicine to Harvard to MIT’s Laboratory for Nuclear Security and Policy to private companies and labs like Merck and others.

Recommendations and ideas floated by Scientists to Stop Covid-19 have already reportedly had far-reaching influence, including affecting policy inside FDA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the group is reportedly advising close Pence aide Nick Ayers.

Among other billionaire influencers and backers to the private initiative include Peter Thiel, Jim Palotta, Michael Milken, Brian Sheth, and Steve Pagliuca, among others.

I was reading this thinking: There’s no way Peter Thiel isn’t involved in this and then . . . yup. https://t.co/anj1BJCBUz

— Elliot Kaufman (@ElliotSKaufman) April 27, 2020

The until now secretive group is led by a 33-year-old physician-turned-venture capitalist, Tom Cahill, and is described as an elite go-between the pharmaceutical industry and Trump administration decision-makers, or an “ad hoc review board” of sorts pursuing cutting edge outside the box ideas.

The scientists include a dozen world renowned researchers, pathology experts and inventors closely networked at institutions ranging from The Scripps Research Lab in La Jolla, California, to Yale University School of Medicine to Harvard to MIT’s Laboratory for Nuclear Security and Policy to private companies and labs like Merck and others.

Recommendations and ideas floated by Scientists to Stop Covid-19 have already reportedly had far-reaching influence, including affecting policy inside FDA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the group is reportedly advising close Pence aide Nick Ayers.

Among other billionaire influencers and backers to the private initiative include Peter Thiel, Jim Palotta, Michael Milken, Brian Sheth, and Steve Pagliuca, among others.

I was reading this thinking: There’s no way Peter Thiel isn’t involved in this and then . . . yup. https://t.co/anj1BJCBUz

— Elliot Kaufman (@ElliotSKaufman) April 27, 2020

As an example of how the group was previously able to get a confidential 17-page report (since published by the WSJ) recommending various introductory unorthodox approaches to fighting and treating the pandemic, the WSJ details :

“Steve Pagliuca, co-owner of the Boston Celtics and the co-chairman of Bain Capital — as well as one of Dr. Cahill’s investors — helped copy edit drafts of their report, and he passed a version to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Executive David Solomon. Mr. Solomon got it to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.”

“Much of the early work involved divvying up hundreds of scientific papers on the crisis from around the world,” the report describes of the team’s daily communications.

“They separated promising ideas from dubious ones. Each member blazed through as many as 20 papers a day, around 10 times the pace they would in their day jobs. They gathered to debate via videoconference, text messages — ‘like a bunch of teenagers,’ Mr. Rosbash said — and phone calls.”

Among the ‘big ideas’ described by the network of researchers led by scientist-investor Dr. Cahill, who first gained the attention of aides within the Trump administration when they listened on an early March conference call tailored toward answering investors’ questions, include the following:

• Experimenting with treatments utilizing powerful anti-Ebola drugs in heavier dosages.
• The possibility of renaming the virus “SARS-2,” after the 2003 China animal virus, so that the connection is better made in the public mind with a deadly disease: “the name sounded scarier and might get more people to wear face masks. They dropped it.”
• The group considers Hydroxychloroquine, long a focus of interest and debate in Trump administration circles, to be “a long shot at best”.
• The team has looked negatively on recent efforts to push antibody testing and ‘immunity passports’ that show recovery from the virus.
• They’ve sought to reduce FDA hurdles and red tape in order to get potential successful drugs out faster, especially to streamline hoped-for ‘miracle’ cures.
• The WSJ emphasizes further: “The scientists had in their research identified monoclonal antibody drugs that latch onto virus cells as the most promising treatment.”
• A saliva test which is easy to administer with ultra-fast results is being pursued, one that offices and companies could utilize to make sure employees come into work virus-free each day.
• Tech like smartphone apps to help track and gauge symptoms is a major focus.
• The scientists are also helping to craft state and national reopening strategies for the near and long-term.

Read a copy of the 17-page report drafted by the Scientists to Stop COVID-19 here.

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Featured image: Brian Sheth, co-founder of Vista Equity Partners (Photo via Bloomberg/WSJ)

For all the uncertainties the COVID-19 pandemic poses to the world, especially in the US, one thing seems evident.  Our neoliberal capitalist civilization has proven itself to be unprepared for unexpected crises and catastrophes. For decades, the US has been falling behind other developed nations to infuse economic resiliency in society. Not only has the American medical system and federal health agencies been shown to be naked, we are also discovering we cannot rely on epistemological statistics and computer modeling alone to account for our flawed health policies.

Aside from the pandemic’s toll on people’s lives, there is also its impact upon the national economies and the global economy at large that is barely being discussed in any depth. Rather, hopes and wishes are being directed towards life returning to normal. We are expected to believe that our addiction to unconscionable consumerism will return, employment will rise and the American dream can again be mentally photo-shopped on the horizon. In short, we are persuaded that the comfort of our illusions and denial of harsh realities will return.  However, if a past Nobel laureate of economics, Joseph Stiglitz, is correct, then “if you leave it to Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell we will have a Great Depression.” Likewise, former Federal Reserve chair Jenet Yellen has also warned that the 30% GDP decline is leading us towards Depression. In fact, we may already be there.

As of today, the federal government has guaranteed $5.2 trillion dollars to keep the economy afloat as a depression worse than 1932 looms overhead. Some economists believe that this massive bailout is insufficient and upwards to $10-15 trillion may be necessary.  In 2008, with one broad stroke the Obama administration rescued Wall Street.  What was believed to be just the TARP bailout of $700 billion was in fact over $4 trillion worth of outlays, including TARP and other FED and Treasury expenditures.  The Levy Institute at Bard College calculated the outlays may have been as high as $29 trillion, a number the Sanders’ campaign had quoted.

Obama’s bailout was to assist the incompetency and corruption of Wall Street and the financial industry. Today it is a submicroscopic organism, approximately 120 nanometers (one nanometer is one billionth of a meter or about 20 oxygen atoms lined up), that threatens the financial well being of most Americans.

However before the COVID-19 reached our shores, the US was already in a horrible debt crisis.

Fiscal conservatives are angered that the US National Debt has reached $24.5 trillion while at the same time adamantly ignoring that the US Total Debt now hovers above $77 trillion. Neither party shows concern about Americans’ increasing personal debt (mortgage, credit card, auto, student loans, etc), nor the rise in corporate, state and city debts.

When we take into consideration $144.6 trillion in US Unfunded Liabilities, $20.4 trillion in Social Security Liability, and $31.6 trillion in Medicare liability, the nation lingers on the precipice a total collapse.

Before the pandemic, Trump boasted an unemployment level as low as 3.6 percent. But in the US, there are different ways to calculate unemployment figures. There is the official figure (U-3) that Wall Street and presidential administrations rely upon and then a more realistic statistic or U-6 that includes those underemployed and those only marginally attached to the work force.

Before the pandemic the “real” or U-6 employment was 6.9 percent.  Finally there is the shadow statistic, which adds the millions of Americans who have dropped out of the work force because their benefits ceased or because they are homeless or unaccounted for by the Labor Bureau.  When those adjustments are made, the shadow unemployment is likely around 23 percent.

Now, unemployment is skyrocketing.  The most recent estimate is that over 26 million people lost work during the past month and, according to Fortune magazine, the official unemployment rate may be as high 18 percent. 

Consequently a more accurate unemployment figure would be approximately 32 percent or almost a third of population. This is far worse than at the height of the Great Depression when unemployment stood at 25 percent.

The dark side of American jobs has been decades of large layoffs, workers being replaced by automation, downsizing, corporate consolidation due to equity partnerships, mergers and off shoring of manufacturing. In addition, tens of thousands of foreign professionals have received work visas and are eager to take the place of middle seniority positions in firms for lower salaries and without full benefits.  The system is so corrupt that the millions of people who work full time for less than a living wage are completely ignored. Hence most Americans are deep in debt and frequently live paycheck to paycheck. The fact of the matter is that there is no security whatsoever for millions of people who may not find work for a very long time.

Even if the lockdown were to end tomorrow, the lights would not immediately switch back on.

Throughout the financial news, we are reading headlines of companies eyeing bankruptcy as credit ratings are being rapidly downgraded.  Retail stores are being especially hit badly. According to Global Data Retail, over 190,000 retail stores have closed, accounting for nearly 50 percent of the nation’s retail square footage. Forbes has listed Dillards, JC Penny, Kohl’s, Levi Strauss, Macy’s, Nordstrom, and Signet to likely go under.  Others include Pier 1 Imports, Rite Aid, J Crew that is loaded up with private equity debt, Fairway supermarkets, and niche organic grocer Lucky’s. Macy’s capital alone dropped from $6 billion to $1.5 billion since February. This trend had already been rising since Trump came to office with large chain companies increasingly closing outlets including Walgreens, Gap, GNC, H&M and Victoria’s Secret. For sure, when and if the pandemic ends, there will be far less retail stores. The New York Times predicts very few are likely to survive. And we are not even looking at the hundreds of their vendors that are also being affected.

With 60 percent of Americans eating regularly outside the home, the restaurant industry is also being hit fiercely. Restaurants employ more minority managers than any other industry — approximately 60% — and employs almost 16 million people. Between 2010 and 2018, it represented the largest number of low middle class jobs ($45,000 to $75,000), 300 percent more than the overall economy. Now a restaurant apocalypse is underway, with an estimated 20 percent of restaurant operations going under. Larger chains are far better equipped. They are simply closing down dining room facilities and only offering carryout, pickup, delivery or drive-thru. Smaller independent restaurants are at the greatest risk.

Then there are the farms, the concentrated agriculture feeding organizations (CAFOs) and food chain suppliers. In the past it was very rare to enter a large grocery store and find empty shelves. Now it is a common sight because the food supply chain has been upended.

Pork and other meat suppliers such as Smithfield Foods, Tyson and Cargill are forced to close plants. Due to Trump’s draconian position on immigration of foreign workers, farm produce will not be harvested.

Niv Ellis at The Hill reports that “some $5 billion of fresh fruit and vegetables have already gone to waste.”  The pandemic, therefore, is contributing to rising food insecurity throughout the nation. Before the pandemic, Ellis notes, 37 million Americans were already food insecure.  The additional 26 million unemployed will increase that number, and it is sure to continue to climb. Finally, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization expects that the frantic efforts underway by countries to import basic staple foods may launch global food inflation.

We are also facing “the quickest and deepest oil demand crash in history,” says Richard Heinberg from the Post Carbon Institute. Oil prices plunged to an inconceivable negative minus $37 a barrel last week as global fossil fuel demand dropped roughly 30 percent. “The entire petroleum industry,” writes Heinberg, “is teetering.”  Natural gas producers relying on hydrofracking shale, which had already been burdened with high debt from private equity, are scrambling for bankruptcy protection. According to Reuters, “numerous midstream companies [in the energy sector] backed by private equity are in danger of bankruptcy.” With the collapse of hydrofracking companies, the pipeline firms have also entered troubled waters. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City predicts that 40 percent of energy producers may be insolvent “if oil prices remain around $30 a barrel” for the year. Then consider the larger picture of the impact this has on the 6.4 million people working in the energy sector.

Also we might consider the future of 15 million Americans who work in the tourism industry, including hotels, entertainment, parks, museums, etc. It is estimated that 96 percent of global tourism has vanished in the blink of an eye.

State and local city governments are also “staring at budget shortfalls that will substantially exceed what they faced during the great recession.” States are reporting significant gaps in their capacity to remain fiscally afloat. The Republican Senate led by Mitch McConnell seems determined to withhold $150 billion of emergency funds to the states in the CARES Act before Congress — less than half of the $300 billion to $1 trillion state legislators are demanding. Consequently, states are staring into a deep abyss.

Americans who will either return to a job or seek work when the pandemic slows will be further imprisoned by an economy buried in greater debt.

• Downsizing will accelerate along with borrowed money to continue operations while the White House refuses to pass a rent holiday, forgive student loans and other debts, cease payday loans, reduce interest rates on credit nor provide free healthcare for those infected with COVID-19;
• The average person without a steady paycheck is living off savings and credit cards. Therefore, when the economy reopens, large numbers of people will be unable to return to the marketplace to circulate dollars;
• As corporate debt mounts, the most insidious truth are the vultures of capitalism who will profit. These are the great white sharks in the finance industry that smell blood. For the trillions of dollars Trump is dishing out to the 1 percent, these are the first to get the lion’s share of the quarry.

Nobody in the mainstream media has properly criticized the huge monetary allocations being made for the pandemic. The FED is buying corporate debt in order for companies to off load their mistakes and receive fresh, new money. But the average small business receives the left over pennies.  The virus is teaching us the harsh reality about Washington pervasive culture of corruption. On this account both parties have no empathic regard for average citizens and small business owners.  Even the money from Trump’s and Mnuchin’s stimulus package given to citizens can be confiscated by debt collectors.

Imagine if you are an average citizen, not an insider, at the conference table with executives from Facebook, Google, the major banks and mega-corporate industries. You have no income or savings and no health insurance. If you are hungry, where do you get money for food? Where do you get money if you are sick or gas for your car? The unintended consequences of Trump’s and the Congress’ irresponsible and inhumane policies are literally bankrupting the nation.

By extension the millennial and iGen generations are the victimized recipients of this debt bequeathed to them by older generations. They are further compromised with the inability to secure jobs equal to their educational level nor secure a satisfying living wage. They are burdened with high interest student loans. They also are far more aware of the impact climate change will have on their futurs. Therefore, millions of young adults are rapidly losing faith in America’s neoliberal capitalist system and our self-centered culture of predation.

Similar to waking up the day following September 11, 2001, we will be emerging into a new world after the COVID19 pandemic subsides. It is now being called the “shut-in economy.” The pandemic is not solely a health crisis; it is equally an existential crisis, an impasse in the global civilization that is forcing us to realize that our over dependence and perverse reliance upon natural resources, such as fuel, energy, food and corrupt banking and healthcare services, is fragile. We are learning that at every level there are numerous cracks in our structures of governance and our economic and social bases.  Yet the virus did not break the nation; it has been broken for a long time. Only now more people are waking up from their dream. Furthermore, few people, including the mainstream media, now believe there will ever be a return to the normalcy of life that ended after Wuhan had its first patient infected with the virus. It is time for every individual to reassess her or his priorities. A life full of well-being is more possible today if we realize the virus has also been our teacher. But it is living a life that is founded upon simplicity, insight and wisdom, and community rather than consumption and competitive power.

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Richard Gale and Dr. Gary Null co-direct Progressive Radio Network. They are frequent contributor to Global Research.

The US’ plan to leverage economic aid to Greenland for strategic ends is exactly the same thing that it accuses China of doing in Africa, suggesting that its infowar against Beijing’s Belt & Road Initiative is driven more by jealousy than anything else since Washington is now emulating its rival’s strategically effective policy.

“Mr Assange will be facing a David and Goliath battle with his hands tied behind his back.” – Edward Fitzgerald QC, lawyer for Julian Assange, April 27, 2020

Julian Assange must have had time amidst cramped and hostile surrounds, paper work, pleas and applications, to ponder what circle of Dante’s Hell he finds himself in.  Ailing but still battling, the WikiLeaks publisher, through his lawyers, made another vicarious appearance at the Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Monday to delay the next stage of extradition proceedings slated for May 18.  He would have appeared via video link, but medical advice suggested it would be unsafe for him to do so at Belmarsh prison. 

Assange, one of the most conspicuously wanted individuals by US authorities for fancifully broad claims of espionage and computer intrusion, had a range of eminently sensible reasons for seeking the delay.  The defence continued in relentless fashion, making arguments they have done throughout.  The feeling for the observer is that, at some point, the District Judge Vanessa Baraitser might bite, or at least shift ever so slightly. 

Assange’s legal team, spearheaded by Edward Fitzgerald QC, noted that adequate case preparations were, in the current circumstances, impossible.  There had been the briefest of phone calls with their client; the defence team had been unable to speak to Assange for over a month.  The case, claimed Fitzgerald, had gone “from difficult to impossible”.  There were “no person-to-person meetings.  The alternative of video conferences is medically dangerous.”  A meeting that was due to take place last week in the holding cells of Woolwich Crown Court never transpired, as prison authorities refused to permit it.

According to the written submission, “It is not possible to take Mr Assange’s instructions in order to respond to the recently served declarations of Mr Kromberg, the US Attorney representing the case for the US.”  Those representing the publisher were “unable to fulfil their professional obligations to him in the circumstances and he is deprived of equality of arms with the prosecution”.

The second ground followed from the first: no full extradition could take place in May that would enable Assange to “participate effectively in the hearing”.  Abiding by principles of open justice would also be improbable given the ongoing pandemic restrictions that would prevent the press and public “to attend and follow proceedings”.  The fourth ground focused on Assange’s own vulnerable constitution, already ravaged by stress and pressure occasioned by his confinement at HMP Belmarsh.  The sum of this was that “he could not fairly be expected to participate in a full evidentiary hearing in May.”

The ever unsympathetic Baraitser, usually unmoved by any defence application that might suggest favour to Assange, accepted the argument that the May 18 date be vacated, and an administrative hearing scheduled for May 4, enabling lawyers on all sides to consider a new date for the full hearing.  The measure was granted, in no small part because of lack of protest from the prosecution.  As James Lewis QC, putting the case for the United States, submitted, “In this extraordinary time, we would support the application.”  Given the circumstances (the judge finally acknowledged the obvious: that Britain was in a coronavirus lockdown), it was unlikely that Assange and his lawyers would be able to physically attend the scheduled May 18 hearing. “Remote attendance by the parties in this case will not be appropriate.  It is now appropriate to vacate that hearing and fix it to a later date.”  At the earliest, a three-week block from November 2 can be made available.

On other points, Baraitser remained cold and tenaciously blind.  She could not see how the lockdown itself had any evident impact on case preparation, nor affect the proper attendance of witnesses.  “I have been given no reason to believe that pre-hearing discussion with expert witnesses can’t take place remotely.”  The issue of Assange’s safety in being transported to a video conference room was a matter for the prison to make.  Nor would press reporting be impaired, despite witnessing, in her own court, the distinctly shonky coverage for media offered by the teleconference facility.

As the UK Bureau Director of Reporters Without Borders Rebecca Vincent would comment, reflecting upon the day’s technical challenges, “resuming the full extradition hearing in such conditions would not allow for open justice.  This case is of tremendous public interest, and the press and NGO observers must be able to scrutinise proceedings.”

Assange supporters and case watchers were relieved by the change of heart shown from the bench.  Kevin Gosztola of Shadowproof opined that a May 18 hearing during the COVID-19 pandemic “would’ve significantly undermined due process rights of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange”.

Then came the next question, a spectre over the stuttered court proceedings: Would Assange be able to obtain bail?  His father, John Shipton, certainly thought so, as obtaining such relief would alleviate the danger of contracting COVID-19 in a “prison where two people have died of the disease”.  According to Renata Avila, a key human rights lawyer and board member for Creative Commons, such a delay would surely entitle Assange to the measure.  “Under current conditions, he cannot prepare his legal defence and he is risking his life.” 

The hope for legal, and compassionate sense to prevail, remains admirably optimistic.  Assange is bound in a cruel legal purgatory, a shackled David facing the Goliath of the US imperium.  But even with his hands tied, Assange is still putting up a most resolute fight.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

Featured image: Julian Assange court sketch, October 21, 2019, supplied by Julia Quenzler.

Rahm Emanuel, up until recently the mayor of Chicago and before that a top advisor to the president in the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama White Houses and still earlier a volunteer in the Israeli Army, famously once commented that a good crisis should never be allowed to go to waste. He meant, of course, that a crisis can be exploited to provide cover for other shenanigans involving politicians. It was an observation that was particularly true when one was working for a sexual predator like Bill, who once attacked a “terrorist” pharmaceutical factory in Sudan to divert attention away from the breaking Monica Lewinski scandal.

To be sure, the United States government is focusing its attention on the coronavirus while also using the cover afforded to heighten the pressure on “enemies” near and far. As the coronavirus continues to spread, the Trump White House and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have increased the ferocity of their sabre rattling, apparently in part to deter Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela. Ironically, of course, none of the countries being intimidated are actually threatening the United States, but we Americans have long since learned that perceptions are more important than facts when it comes to the current occupant of the oval office and his two predecessors.

The latest bit of mendacity coming out of the White House was a presidential tweet targeting the usual punching bag, Iran. Based on an incident that occurred two weeks ago, Trump threatened “I have instructed the United States Navy to shoot down and destroy any and all Iranian gunboats if they harass our ships at sea.” Iran’s flying gunboats are clearly a formidable force but it is certainly reassuring to note that naval anti-aircraft fire has been directed to deal with them. The U.S. Navy ships in question are, one might also observe, in a body of water generally referred to as the Persian Gulf, where they are carrying out maneuvers right off of the Iranian coast. Meanwhile, Iranian flying gunboats have not yet been observed off of New Jersey, but they are probably waiting to be transported to the Eastern Seaboard by those huge trans-oceanic gliders that once upon a time were allegedly being constructed by Saddam Hussein.

I have instructed the United States Navy to shoot down and destroy any and all Iranian gunboats if they harass our ships at sea.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 22, 2020

Given the cover provided by the virus, it should surprise no one that Israel is also playing the same game. The Jewish state has been continuing its lethal bombings of Syria, with hardly any notice in the international media. In a recent missile attack, nine people were killed near the historic city of Palmyra. Three of the dead were Syrians while six others were presumed to be Lebanese Shi’ites supporting the Damascus government. Israel de facto regards any Shi’ite as an “Iranian” or an “Iranian proxy” and therefore a “terrorist” eligible to be killed on sight.

But the bigger coronavirus story has to do with Israel’s domestic politics. Benjamin Netanyahu and his principle opponent Benny Gantz have come to an agreement to form a national government, ostensibly to deal with the health crisis. The wily Netanyahu, who will continue to be prime minister in the deal, has thereby retained his power over the government while also putting a halt to bids from the judiciary to try and sentence him on corruption charges. As part of the deal with Gantz, Netanyahu will have veto power over the naming of the new government’s attorney general and state prosecutor, guaranteeing the appointment of individuals who will dismiss the charges.

And more will be coming, with the acquiescence of Washington. U.S. elections are little more than six months away and Donald Trump clearly believes that he needs the political support of Netanyahu to energize his rabid Christian Zionist supporters, as well as the cash coming from Jewish oligarchs Sheldon Adelson, Bernard Marcus and Paul Singer. So, it is time to establish a quid pro quo, which will be Israeli government behind the scenes approaches to powerful and wealthy American Jews on behalf of Trump while the White House will look the other way while Israel annexes most of the remaining Palestinian West Bank. Pompeo has welcomed the new Israeli government and has confirmed that the annexation of the Palestinian land will be “ultimately Israel’s decision to make,” which amounts to a green light for Netanyahu to go ahead.

A vote on West Bank annexation will reportedly be taken by the Knesset at the beginning of July followed immediately by steps to incorporate Jewish settlements into Israel proper. According to the Israeli liberal newspaper Haaretz, the planned annexation has raised some concerns among a few liberal American Jewish organizations because it will convince many progressives in the U.S. that Israel has truly become an apartheid state. J Street warned that annexation “would severely imperil Israel’s future as a democratic homeland for the Jewish people, along with the future of the U.S.-Israel relationship” and has even suggested cutting U.S. aid if that step is actually taken. Most other ostensibly liberal groups have adopted the usual Zionist two-step, i.e. condemning the move but not advocating any effective steps to prevent it. And it should also be noted that the largest and most powerful Jewish organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) have not raised any objections at all.

Unaffiliated individual liberal Jews, to include those who consider themselves Zionists, have generally been concerned about the move, though their argument is quite hypocritical, based on their belief that annexation would pari passu destroy any possible two-state solution, damaging both Palestinian rights and “Jewish democracy.” Some have even welcomed the change, noting that it would create a single state de facto which eventually would have to evolve into a modern democracy with equal rights for all. Such thinking is, however, nonsense. Israel under Netanyahu and whichever fascist retread that eventually succeeds him regards itself as a Jewish state and will do whatever it takes to maintain that, even including dispossessing remaining Arabs of their land and possessions, stripping them of their legal status, and forcing them to leave as refugees. That is something that might be referred to as ethnic cleansing, or even genocide.

And those Americans of conscience who are hoping for some change if someone named Joe Biden defeats Trump can also forget about that option. Biden has told the New York Times that “I believe a two-state solution remains the only way to ensure Israel’s long-term security while sustaining its Jewish and democratic identity. It is also the only way to ensure Palestinian dignity and their legitimate interest in national self-determination. And it is a necessary condition to take full advantage of the opening that exists for greater cooperation between Israel and its Arab neighbors. For all these reasons, encouraging a two-state solution remains in the critical interest of the United States.”

Unfortunately, someone should tell Joe that that particular train has already left the station due to the expansion of the Jewish state’s settlements. Nice words from the man who would be president aside, Biden is bound to the Israel Lobby for its political support and the money it provides as tightly as can be and he will fold before AIPAC and company like a cheap suit. He has famously declared that “You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist – I am a Zionist” and “My Name is Joe Biden, and Everybody Knows I Love Israel.” His vice-presidential candidates’ debate with Sarah Palin in 2008 turned embarrassing when he and Palin both engaged in long soliloquys about how much they cherish Israel. Indeed they do. Every politician on the make loves Israel.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from TUR

A senior official in Iraq’s al-Anbar province warned of the increasing presence of the ISIS terrorists in the desert areas of the province which are controlled by the US forces.

“These areas are controlled by the US military men and are a safe haven for the terrorists,” the official was quoted as saying by the Arabic-language al-Ma’aloumeh news agency on Saturday.

He added that the Americans are supplying the ISIS terrorists with the necessary weapons and logistical equipment.

The official warned of the US attempts to transfer a large number of ISIS terrorists from occupied regions of Syria to Iraq’s western desert province of al-Anbar. The terrorists pose a great danger to inhabitants of this area, as well as the bordering areas with Syria.

The aim of the US and its NATO and regional Wahhabi partners in crime is quite obviously fomenting tension and unrest in Iraq in the future, giving them an excuse to continue occupying Iraqi and Syrian territories, all under the pretext of “fighting terrorism”.

In relevant remarks in March, another Iraqi official had also warned that the ISIS terrorists were being supported by the US in the western desert areas of the al-Anbar province along the border with occupied parts of Syria.

“The US is increasing its forces in al-Anbar and monitors the bordering line between Iraq and Syria,” Head of Badr Organization’s Office in al-Anbar Qusai al-Anbari said.

He added that the US is attempting to transfer the largest-ever number of ISIS terrorists into Iraq, adding that they are supported by the US in the desert areas of al-Anbar after arriving from Syria through US heliborne operations. Al-Anbari warned that “certain Iraqis” are also attempting to facilitate the ISIS traffic into Iraq’s western deserts in support of terrorism following a clandestine agreement with the Americans.

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The Brazilian government was shaken by a new controversy on Friday after the General Director of the Federal Police, Maurício Valeixo, was sacked by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Following threats made on Thursday, the Minister of Justice and Public Security, Sergio Moro, responsible for the appointment of Valeixo, decided to leave the administration of Bolsonaro, giving a controversial farewell speech with serious accusations against the president.

According to Moro, Bolsonaro’s desire to change the command of the Federal Police was motivated by a desire to interfere politically in the institution, and to gain access to confidential content of investigations about the president’s allies and family members, including his own sons. The accusations made by Bolsonaro had a great impact on the local media, but none-the-less the Brazilian president denied the allegations later that day.

Speaking a little longer than usual, Bolsonaro tried to defend himself against Moro’s accusations by talking about several different issues, but, when he spoke about his former minister, he concentrated on damaging his image before the electorate, placing him as the new enemy of his government. This is a usual tactic by the Brazilian president who always seeks an enemy to legitimize his policies and popularity.

Bolsonaro who modelled himself as the “Tropical Trump” continuously took aim against local Leftists, Venezuela, Cuba, China and anybody else that U.S. President Donald Trump also did not like. By casting an enemy, he could galvanize the Brazilian people behind him. As expected, the president’s main strategy in his speech in response to Moro was to find a new enemy.

Bolsonaro’s statements to the press were divided into three parts: focused attacks on the reputation of his former minister, describing him as an egocentric person with electoral interests; highlighting the presidential prerogative of appointing the commander of the Federal Police; and, trying to focus on valuing his own profile, talking about the assassination attempt he suffered, resources he failed to spend and the importance of his position. So, what we perceive from the speech, essentially, is what was already expected – the attempted polarization to put public opinion against Moro, while at the same time minimizing his decision to interfere with the Federal Police.

A dichotomy between Moro and Bolsonaro is emerging on social media, and it appears that Moro is winning this battle on the internet. Even before Moro’s resignations, tens of thousands went to Bolsonaro’s Twitter and Facebook accounts to tell the president that they voted for him but will not support him anymore if Moro resigns.

Earlier this month, the popularity of Bolsonaro had dropped to 33% because of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which he described as a “fantasy” and a “minor flu.” Earlier this month it was also revealed that the military, in which Bolsonaro is a former Captain of and strongly advocated for during his election campaign, has now shifted their support and backing for Vice President Hamilton Mourao, a former general.

Everything indicates that Bolsonaro may fall in a matter of months, and it appears this scenario can come to fruition sooner with the resignation of the highly popular Moro who was a key player in prosecuting Brazil’s Leftist former President, Lula. It certainly means that the 33% approval rating has dropped significantly after the fall out with Moro.

In an investigation by the Supreme Court, the Federal police identified councillor Carlos Bolsonaro, son of Jair Bolsonaro, as one of the articulators of a criminal fake news scheme. According to Folha, Bolsonaro wanted Valeixo removed because he knew of the criminal acts Carlos was involved in. It is not reduced to just Carlos though, and rather all three of Bolsonaro’s politically active sons, along with his wife Michelle, have been implicated in corruption scandals.

One of the main appeals of Bolsonaro was his strong rhetoric of being against corruption, which is why he brought Moro into his administration because of his popularity after putting some Brazilian politicians behind bars because of their corruption. However, this has been proven to be a scam as not only are their major questions whether those prosecuted had engaged in corruption, but there are endless scandals and accusations of corruption levelled against the Bolsonaro family.

Bolsonaro modelled himself on Trump and followed him in nearly every major foreign policy agenda regarding not only Latin America, but also China and Israel. Despite Bolsonaro being the greatest advocate for American and Israeli relations the continent has seen in decades, it is highly unlikely that either Trump or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will come out in support of Bolsonaro as he faces a very real impeachment. It now appears that all this time of pandering to the U.S. and its interests is beginning to crash down on Bolsonaro. Rather than serve the interests of his country in this new multipolar world, he wanted to maintain the hegemonic status of the U.S. and get away with corruption – now where is Trump?

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

U.S. policy towards Venezuela has been a head-spinning series of contradictions lately, with no end in sight. From placing a bounty on the heads of President Nicolas Maduro and a dozen current and former Venezuelan officials, to upping sanctions and sending the largest fleet ever to the Southern hemisphere to stop drug trafficking from Venezuela, the U.S. appears to be pursuing an inexorable path towards regime change.

But at the same time, U.S. officials have announced they don’t seek a “coup” against Maduro, that the U.S. Naval deployment doesn’t seek his ouster, and that the United States wants Maduro to agree to a power-sharing deal, despite the bounty they’ve placed on his head.

An examination of the timeline reveals the last month of U.S. policy towards Venezuela has been nothing if not chaotic.

At the end of March, the United States indicted Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro and a dozen former and current officials on corruption, narco-terrorism and drug trafficking charges. The State Department announced that the U.S. will pay $15 million for information leading to Maduro’s arrest and conviction.

A day later, Elliot Abrams, reportedly chosen as the U.S. Special Envoy for Venezuela by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for his expertise on coups, announced the “Democratic Transition Framework for Venezuela.” The framework calls on Maduro’s government to embrace a power-sharing deal. The plan doesn’t explain how Venezuelan leaders with bounties on their heads could come to the table and negotiate with Juan Guaido, whom the U.S. recognizes as Venezuela’s legitimate leader.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration increased sanctions on Venezuela and announced with much fanfare that U.S. Naval warships were on their way to the Caribbean to prevent “corrupt actors” and drug cartels from smuggling narcotics into the U.S.

“The goal is to replace [President Nicolas] Maduro’s illegitimate dictatorship with a legitimate transitional government that can hold free and fair elections to represent all Venezuelans. It is time for Maduro to go,” said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

A few days after that, and eighteen years after the U.S. supported a coup against Hugo Chavez, Abrams warned that if Maduro resisted the organization of a “transitional government” his departure would be far more “dangerous and abrupt.” Yes, this is the same Abrams who only days earlier had recommended a power-sharing arrangement. To many, Abrams’ aggressive rhetoric looked a lot like the U.S. “effectively threatening him with another assassination attempt” like the one the U.S. “tacitly supported in 2018.”

But then, the head of U.S. Southern Command Admiral Craig Faller rhetorically reversed course four days ago.

Faller said the U.S. buildup in the Caribbean is not aimed at ousting Maduro. The decision to double anti-narcotics assets in Latin America was not directly tied to Maduro’s indictment, and “economic and diplomatic pressure — not the use of military force — remain the U.S.’s” preferred tools for removing Maduro from power, said Faller.

Despite the fact that he’s leading the largest ever U.S. Naval deployment in the Southern hemisphere, and the biggest deployment since the invasion to remove Gen. Manuel Noriega of Panama, Faller contends that his operation is “not an indication of some sort of new militarization in the Caribbean” and that “this is not a shift in U.S. government policy.”

So, the Trump administration’s real aims in Venezuela remain elusive, if not confusing.

“Certainly the timing of the deployment, coming as it does on the heels of the DOJ’s indictment of Maduro on narco-terrorism charges and the placement of a bounty on his head, looks suspicious,” said Dr. Alejandro Velasco, associate professor of Modern Latin America at New York University, in an interview with TAC. “While there may not be a causal relationship between the deployment and the administration’s regime-change policy, there is a strong correlation between the two.”

“To the extent that DOJ has indicted Maduro et al on narco-terrorism charges, and the Navy operation is geared at disrupting drug cartels, then it follows that, at the very least, the aim of the deployment is to squeeze Maduro,” said Velasco. “The issue is that Maduro’s primary (or even secondary or tertiary) source of revenue isn’t narcotics, it’s minerals like oil and gold.”

“The fact is, there is a government in Venezuela that the U.S. government does not like, and the U.S. has been citing and bolstering [Maduro’s rival] the interim president Juan Guaido, funding him and spearheading an effort to get him to either—initially it was to take office, now it’s to negotiate,” said Dr. Eduardo Gamarra, a professor and expert on Latin American politics at Florida International University, in an interview with TAC.

“It’s curious, because on the one hand, our government has indicted Maduro and set a bounty on his head… we’ve labelled Maduro a drug trafficker whom we want to extradite, but then the following week, we said we want to negotiate with him.”

One thing is for certain—the Trump administration’s stated intention, of deploying the U.S. Navy to interdict narco-trafficking, is nonsensical, said Gamarra.

“Most of my research has been on drug trafficking trends, and if you look at those, and the U.S. has done these kinds of anti-trafficking exercises many times in the past, we’ve had very little impact on the flow of drugs northward,” said Gamarra. “There’s a balloon effect, where if we squeeze the Caribbean, then most drugs come through Mexico … Eighty three percent of cocaine that comes into the U.S. enters through Mexico, currently aided by Mexican cartels.”

Drug traffickers don’t need to transport drugs through the Caribbean when there’s a relatively unguarded land route via the U.S. southern border, he said. Of course, as coronavirus ravages the globe, the flow of all goods have declined, so “we will probably see a decline in drugs too.” But the fact is that the majority of drugs that enter the U.S. do so through the Pacific, not the Atlantic coast.

The Trump administration may have its eyes on domestic political prizes rather than long-term foreign policy goals, suggests Velasco. There are big pockets of Venezuelan and Cuban Americans in swing-state Florida that eagerly greeted the news of the U.S. deployment, only to be let down by the subsequent lack of action and contradictory administration statements, Gamarra points out.

“As time passes, they get the sense that they’ve again been duped,” said Gamarra. “How long has it been since this administration told Venezuelans ‘all options are on the table?’ Maduro is still there, not weaker but stronger. [On Thursday] in at least four states, there were massive lootings, the state has essentially collapsed, but still the government doesn’t fall, and the virus has actually helped strengthen its position … what is the U.S. waiting for?”

Roger Noriega, AEI fellow and former ambassador, said the mobilization of assets off the coast of Venezuela “is a very tangible sign that the U.S. is losing its patience” with Maduro, who agrees with the administration’s aggressive approach.

“The costs are getting rather high, right on our doorstep,” he said. “Maduro’s regime is destabilizing the rest of the region, including our key ally Colombia, and aiding and abetting narco-trafficking and presiding over a humanitarian disaster.”

“Sooner rather than later, I think Trump’s going to have to consider being much more forceful in dealing with this. That could mean carving out a no-fly zone, territory for humanitarian aid, or getting authority from Congress to conduct clandestine operations against bad guys at the head of the regime. So far, they have been far from creative in dealing with this threat, which has been worsening on their watch.”

Noriega doesn’t think “too many people would blame” Trump “if he went in with a small force to take care of this festering criminal regime in the way we did with Noriega” in the ’80s, but if it comes to that, it will be because “there’s been a real failure here of U.S. intelligence, and a complete and utter lack of creative thinking from the career diplomats. They’re the ones who wrote the ridiculous framework for a diplomatic transition.”

“The State Department’s approach is completely out of sync with what the president ostensibly wants to do,” he said. “When his DOJ indicts these guys, when the DoD deploys these additional forces to deal with the criminal threat, when the Treasury Department is heaping on sanctions, and then the State Department comes out with this rather surrealistic plan that essentially blesses a narco-trafficking framework to stay in power, it shows a profound lack of understanding about the dynamics within the region.”

Not everyone would agree with Noriega, who has been a hawk on the region since his days as Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs under George W. Bush. With a pandemic competing for the full attention (and resources) of the federal government it may be likely that Trump’s anti-interventionist instincts win over. One thing is clear: the administration’s muddy policy in the region, and the resulting confusion it kicks up, may be the worst of both worlds, setting both countries on a collision course towards regime change.

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Barbara Boland is TAC’s foreign policy and national security reporter. Previously, she worked as an editor for the Washington Examiner and for CNS News. She is the author of Patton Uncovered, a book about General George Patton in World War II, and her work has appeared on Fox News, The Hill,  UK Spectator, and elsewhere. Boland is a graduate from Immaculata University in Pennsylvania.  Follow her on Twitter @BBatDC.

Featured image: Activists gather in front of the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, DC in March, 2019.

Americans awaiting their COVID-19 stimulus and unemployment checks will be thrilled to know their taxes continue to be spent via Netanyahu bombing and murdering Syrians in their homes. Israel remains the US’ most voracious welfare state queen, subsidized at more than four billion USD, annually. Netanyahu’s criminal and cowardly pre-dawn bombings murdered three civilians and injured three others.

The Netanyahu regime’s murderous war crimes against Syrians, today, involved another breach of International Law, Israel’s aggressive and illegal entry into Lebanon’s airspace. In 2014, Obama’s one billion guaranteed loan bribe to Abdullah was grounded in Jordan giving legal access to its airspace to Israel. The Netanyahu regime prefers to flout its chutzpah when murdering Syrians, and the NATO klan running the UN ignore all legitimate complaints from Lebanon.

In al Hujaira, Damascus’s southeastern countryside, one home bombed by the Netanyahu regime forces resulted in the murders of a husband and wife, in addition to injuries of two other adults and one child. This family had been displaced from al Quneitra city, by NATO-backed and armed moderate terrorists.

Another woman was murdered by Israeli bombing, in al Adliya.

Unindicted war criminal Netanyahu air force targeted people’s homes, including ones under construction, identified by the steel rope lay in this photograph.

Given the timing of the war criminal bombings, and Syria’s curfews to prevent the spread of COVID-19, these murder victims were killed in their homes, and likely while sleeping.

Netanyahu regime media have pulled out all the stops in hasbara fake headlines. Beyond Kafka and beyond chutzpah, they continue to ridiculously cite British owned and funded SOHR, fake founded by a thrice convicted on felony charges criminal, who jumped bail more than one decade ago — to avoid his fourth trial, leaving his pals holding the bag — who sought refuge in England, courtesy of the British taxpayers.

More housing under construction, bombed by Netanyahu regime forces.

Syria News reminds our readers that mere hours before Israel criminally bombed Tadmor on 20 April, Madman Netanyahu had barked that COVID-19 would not diminish his war crimes.

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Black Alliance for Peace National Organizer Ajamu Baraka discussed the role of U.S. activists in stopping the U.S. war machine during “An Inside View of Resistance to US Imperialism in Venezuela and How to Build International Solidarity,” a webinar co-hosted by the Black Alliance for Peace, Alliance For Global Justice, CODEPINK: Women For Peace, International Action Center, Sanctions Kill and United National Antiwar Coalition.

Featuring speakers from the Venezuelan government, U.S. Peace Council and Popular Resistance.

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Giulietto Chiesa died a few hours after concluding the April 25^th International Conference “Let’s Get Rid of War Virus”  on the 75th Anniversary of Italian Liberation and the End of World War II. The streaming conference was organized by the No War No Nato Committee – Giulietto was one of its founders – and GlobalResearch (Canada), the Centre for Research on Globalization directed by Professor Michel Chossudovsky.

Several speakers – from Italy to other European countries, from the United States to Russia, from Canada to Australia – examined the fundamental reasons why war has never ended since 1945: the Second World conflict was followed by the Cold War, then by an uninterrupted series of wars and the return to a situation similar to that of the Cold War, with increased risk of nuclear conflict.

Economists Michel Chossudovsky (Canada), Peter Koenig (Switzerland) and Guido Grossi  explained  how powerful economic and financial forces are exploiting the coronavirus crisis to take over national economies, and what to do to thwart this plan.

David Swanson (director of World Beyond War, USA), economist Tim Anderson (Australia), photojournalist Giorgio Bianchi and historian Franco Cardini talked about past and current wars, functional to the interests of the same powerful forces.

Political-military expert Vladimir Kozin (Russia), essayist Diana Johnstone (USA), Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Kate Hudson (UK) examined the mechanisms increasing the chance of a catastrophic nuclear conflict.

John Shipton (Australia), – father of Julian Assange, and Ann Wright (USA) – former US Army colonel, illustrated the dramatic situation of journalist Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder detained in London at risk of being extradited to the United States where a life or death sentence awaits him.

Giulietto Chiesa’s participation focused on this issue. In summary, these are some passages of what he said:

“Someone wants to destroy Julian Assange: this fact means that we too, all of us will be fooled, obscured, threatened, unable to understand what is going on at home and in the world. This is not our future; it is our present.

In Italy the government is organizing a team of censors officially charged with cleaning up all news differing from the official news. It is State censorship, how else can it be called?

Rai, public Television, is also setting up a task force against “fake news” to erase the traces of their everyday lies, flooding all their television screens.

And then there is even worse, mysterious courts far more powerful than these fake news hunters: they are Google, Facebook, who manipulate news and censure without appeal with their algorithms and secret tricks.

We are already surrounded by new Courts that cancel our rights. Do you remember Article 21 of the Italian Constitution? It says “everyone has the right to freely express its thought.” But 60 million Italians are forced to listen to a single megaphone that screams from all 7 Television channels of the Power. That’s why Julian Assange is a symbol, a flag, an invitation to rescue, to wake up before it’s too late.

It is essential to join all forces we have, which are not so small but have a fundamental flaw: that of being divided, unable to speak with a single voice. We need an instrument to speak to the millions of citizens who want to know.”

This was Giulietto Chiesa’s last appeal. His words were confirmed by the fact that, immediately after the streaming, the on line conference was obscured because “the following content has been identified by the YouTube community as inappropriate or offensive to some audiences.”

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This article appeared on the Italian web newspaper, Il Manifesto.

Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Once again, the good old reliable US major media proved unreliable again — time and again delivering fake news to readers, viewers and listeners.

On April 20, the NYT reported that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un “was receiving treatment after undergoing heart surgery.”

Days later, the Times asked: “Where in Kim-Jong-un? Rumors are swirling about Kim Jong-un’s location and health.”

On Sunday, the Washington Post asked is Kim “dead after heart surgery? Is he lying in a vegetative state in a hospital bed?”

After being out of public view in 2014, there were false rumors of his death or a military coup.

The Wall Street Journal quoted Wilson Center public policy fellow Jean Lee, saying rumors about Kim’s health “could impact his ability to lead the country.”

Market Watch.com reported that Kim was either dead or in a “vegetative state,” citing Hong Kong and Japanese media.

MSNBC’s Katy Tur reported that Kim was “brain dead,” citing unnamed US officials, adding:

“He recently had cardiac surgery and slipped into a coma.”

So-called media analyst Mark Dice claimed the above information is “confirmed.”

The Washington Examiner claimed that Kim is in “grave danger” after surgery, adding:

“A US official with direct knowledge of the matter told CNN” that the US was “monitoring intelligence of” his conditions.

South Korean-based Daily NK cited unnamed sources, claiming that Kim had a “cardiovascular surgical procedure.”

CNN’s chief national security correspondent Jim Sciutto claimed he was “told by a US official with direct knowledge that the US is monitoring intelligence that the North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un is in grave danger following a surgery.”

RT mocked CNN with the following headline:

“No confirmation needed? CNN fans rumors about Kim Jong-un’s alleged health issues, reports he’s in ‘grave danger’ after ‘surgery.’ ”

Screenshot from RT News

Bloomberg News got it wrong with a similar report, claiming Kim was in “critical condition.”

Senator Lindsey Graham was quoted, saying “’I’ll Be Shocked If He’s Not Dead.”

An unnamed Trump regime official said it’s unclear if Kim is alive or dead.

Former CIA deputy division chief for North Korea Bruce Klinger noted numerous earlier “rumors about Kim’s health,” adding:

“(O)ver the years, there have been a number of false health rumors about Kim Jong-Un (and) his father.”

A spokesman for South Korea’s Blue House (its White House equivalent) said the following:

“We have no information to confirm regarding rumors about Chairman Kim Jong Un’s health issue that have been reported by some media outlets. Also, no unusual developments have been detected inside North Korea.”

Britain’s Express said Kim hadn’t been seen in public since April 11, adding:

“Reports suggest his sister, Kim Yo Jon…could be set to take over.”

On Sunday, South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s senior policy adviser Moon Chung-in said Kim was “alive and well,” claims otherwise false.

Western media rumors, speculation, and reports got it all wrong.

On Monday, South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency quoted Pyongyang’s Rodong Sinmun, the DPRK’s main broadsheet, saying Kim thanked builders in the country’s port city of Wonsan, the report saying:

Kim “sent his appreciation to the workers who devoted themselves to building the Wonsan-Kalma tourist zone.”

Satellite imagery reportedly showed his train in the area last week.

Rumors about his death or serious illness circulated when he wasn’t at a birthday ceremony for his late grandfather, Kim Il-sung, North Korea’s founder.

On Monday, RT mocked Western media, headlining: “Not dead anymore?”

“(M)edia (now) downplay death rumors after Seoul adviser sa(id) (Kim) is ‘alive and well.’ ”

Reports of his death, grave danger, vegetative state, being brain dead in a coma were greatly exaggerated.

They were fake news all along, no credible information supporting them.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Among the “losers of globalization” in the US, in addition to African-Americans and Latinos, indebted university students and white adults over 45 years of age without university studies and with jobs with low added value appear for the first time, after being enrolled in the ranks of the unemployed. , they would have ended up plunged into an explosive circle of depression, alcoholism, drug addiction and suicide after seeing the blackbird of the “American dream” disappear, which would have had as a collateral effect the disaffection of these segments of the white population with respect to the traditional Democratic and Republican establishment.

Thus, according to an NBC survey, 54% of the white population would be “angry with the system,” compared to 43% of Latinos and 33% of African Americans who continue to trust the American dream, which would have led White voters to support politically incorrect positions and refractory to the dictates of Donald Trump’s traditional republican establishment, symbolized by the support of outraged whites over 45 years of age for Trump and of the neo-Nazi and white supremacist parties that continue to control the spheres of power of “deep America”.

Paranoia and hybris syndrome in Donald Trump

The Spanish psychiatrist Enrique González Duro in his book La paranoia (1991 *), affirms that

“the triggers of this disease are very active in individuals who present a pronounced narcissism and who have been exposed to serious frustrations, consequently being endowed with low self-esteem ”.

Donald Trump’s personality would fit fully into the medical description of the disorder known as paranoid psychosis because his thinking is rigid and incorrigible: he does not take into account the opposite reasons, he only collects data or signs that confirm the prejudice to turn him into conviction and even if he is afflicted with such delusional disorder it would be quite functional and does not tend to show strange behavior except as a direct result of the delusional idea (read the construction of the Wall with Mexico).

In the specific case of Trump, we would be facing a typical case of megalomaniac paranoia, delusion of greatness that causes the individual to create himself endowed with extraordinary talent and power because the deities have chosen him for a high mission (restoring the White Power in a society in which demographic evolution will cause the white population to be a minority in the 2,043 scenario).

Trump’s paranoia would have been aggravated by being affected by the so-called “hydris syndrome” cited by the English doctor and politician David Owen in his work “The Hybris Syndrome: Busch, Blair ant the Intoxication of Power”. This term comes from the Greek word “hybris” which means excess and in his work, Owen defines it as “the exaggerated self-confidence of politicians when they reach power brings with it the Subject’s excessive self-confidence, exacerbated pride and rebuff before others, and may lead to abuse of power (autocracy) and the temptation to harm the lives of others. ” Another trait would be histrionics that impels him to “attract public attention and be reckless in his statements without caring about the opinion of others due to his evident lack of morality”, which would be his advice to use disinfectant to cure the coronavirus.

Can COVID-19 end Trump’s dystopia?

The theory of the Black Swan was developed by Nicholas Taleb in his book “The Black Swan (2010) in which he tries to explain” the psychological biases that make people individually and collectively blind to uncertainty and unaware of the massive role of the strange event in the historical issues ”, which would explain Trump’s frivolization of the coronavirus and his delay in adopting surgical measures in the main centers of transmission of the coronavirus in the USA. This would have exacerbated the effects of the pandemic in the United States in the form of a trickle of the dead, the collapse of medical services, the paralysis of productive activity and the recession of the United States economy.

Likewise, the collapse of the oil price would have caused nearly 200 bankruptcy declarations of companies dedicated to shale with an accumulated debt of nearly $ 120 billion that will subsequently affect the income statement of large banks such as JP Morgan, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo and that could lead to a new financial crisis in the future. On the other hand, the inaction of the companies would have triggered a stratospheric increase in unemployment (26 million unemployed), which together with the Wall Street stock market crash could dilute the beneficial effects of Donald Trump’s economic policy and cause the disaffection of the population segment of its voters (40% of the electorate) in the next Presidential elections in November.

Thus, the traumatic shock that the coronavirus pandemic will generate in American society and the subsequent recession of its economy will force a profound catharsis and metanoia of society as a whole, which will cause the fundamentals that underpin it to be revised. The metanoia would be to transform the mind to adopt a new way of thinking, with new ideas, new knowledge and an entirely new attitude in the face of the emergence of the new pandemic scenario, which will imply the double connotation of physical movement (retracing the path followed) and psychological ( change of mentality after discarding the old prevailing stereotypes). This will have as beneficial effects the rediscovery of values such as respect for the environment, solidarity and equal rights in a new stage that will lead to the implementation of new renewable energy, basic income, unemployment benefits as well as healthcare Universal Public, a stage that will symbolize the end of the Trump dystopia and the reissue of the Rooseveltian “New Deal”.

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Germán Gorraiz López is an analyst.

In my first week in the House of Representatives in 1976, I cast one of the two votes against legislation appropriating funds for a swine flu vaccination program. A swine flu outbreak was then dominating headlines, so most in DC were frantic to “do something” about the virus.

Unfortunately, the hastily developed and rushed-into-production swine flu vaccine was not only ineffective, it was dangerous. Approximately 50 people who received the vaccine subsequently contracted Guillain-Barré syndrome, a potentially fatal form of paralysis. According to an expert with the Centers for Disease Control, the incidence of Guillain-Barré was four times higher among those who received the swine flu vaccine than in the general population.

That sad history may soon repeat itself. Right now, governments and private industries are working to rapidly develop and deploy a coronavirus vaccine. Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who is a major funder of these efforts, has suggested everyone who receives a vaccine be issued a “digital certificate” proving he has been vaccinated. Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose record of wrong predictions makes him the Bill Kristol of epidemiology, also wants individuals to carry some proof they have been vaccinated.

Another authoritarian proposal floated to deal with coronavirus is to force everyone to download a phone app that will track their movements. This would allow government officials to identify those who may have been near anyone who may have had coronavirus. Such mandatory “contact tracing” is an assault on our privacy and liberty.

Vaccines can improve health. For example, vaccines helped reduce the incidence of diseases like polio. But not all vaccines are safe and effective for all people. Furthermore, certain modern practices, such as giving infants multiple vaccines at one time, may cause health problems. The fact that vaccines may benefit some people, or even most people, does not justify government forcing individuals to be vaccinated. It also does not justify vaccinating children against their parents’ wishes. And it certainly does not justify keeping individuals and families in involuntary quarantine because they do not have “digital certificates” proving they have had their shots.

If government can force individuals to receive medical treatment against their will, then there is no reason why government cannot force individuals to buy medical insurance, prohibit them from owning firearms, dictate their terms of employment, and prevent them from taking arguably harmful actions like smoking marijuana or drinking raw milk. Similarly, if government can override parents’ wishes regarding medical treatment for their children, then there is no reason why government cannot usurp parental authority in other areas, such as education.

Proponents of mandatory vaccines and enhanced surveillance are trying to blackmail the American people by arguing that the lockdown cannot end unless we create a healthcare surveillance state and make vaccination mandatory. The growing number of Americans who are tired of not being able to go to work, school, or church, or even to take their children to a park because of government mandates should reject this “deal.” Instead, they should demand an immediate end to the lockdowns and the restoration of individual responsibility for deciding how best to protect their health.

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Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

Giulietto Chiesa morreu algumas horas depois de concluir, no 75º Aniversário da Libertação e do fim da Segunda Guerra Mundial, a Conferência Internacional de 25 de Abril, “Libertemo-nos do Vírus da Guerra”. Uma conferência de transmissão ao vivo, organizada pelo Comitato No War No NATO, do qual era um dos fundadores, e pela Global Research (Canadá), o centro de pesquisa sobre a globalização, dirigido pelo Professor Michel Chossudovsky.

Vários oradores – da Itália e de outros países europeus, dos Estados Unidos à Rússia, do Canadá à Austrália – examinaram as razões subentendidas devido às quais a guerra nunca terminou desde 1945: a Segunda Guerra Mundial foi seguida pela Guerra Fria, depois houve uma série ininterrupta de guerras e o regresso a uma situação análoga à da Guerra Fria, que aumenta o risco de um conflito nuclear.

Os economistas, Michel Chossudovsky (Canadá), Peter Koenig (Suíça) e Guido Grossi (Itália), explicaram como é que as forças económicas e financeiras poderosas exploram a crise do coronavírus para dominar as economias nacionais e o que devemos fazer para impedir esse plano.

David Swanson (Director do World Beyond War, USA), o economista Tim Anderson (Australia), o fotojornalista Giorgio Bianchi e o historiador Franco Cardini, falaram sobre as guerras passadas e presentes, ligadas aos interesses dessas mesmas forças poderosas.

O perito em questões politico-militares, Vladimir Kozin (Russia), a ensaísta Diana Johnstone (Usa),  a secretária da Campanha para o Desarmamento Nuclear, Kate Hudson (Reino Unido), analisaram os mecanismos que aumentam a probabilidade de um conflito nuclear catastrófico.

John Shipton (Austrália), pai de Julian Assange e Ann Wright (USA), antiga Coronel do US Army, retrataram a situação dramática de Julian Assange, o jornalista fundador do WikiLeaks, detido em Londres, com o risco de ser extraditado para os Estados Unidos, onde o aguarda a sentença de prisão perpétua ou a pena de morte.

Giulietto Chiesa direccionou a sua intervenção sobre esse tema. Em resumo, estas são algumas passagens:

“O facto de que se queira destruir Julian Assange significa que, também nós, todos nós, seremos amordaçados, obscurecidos, ameaçados, incapazes de compreender o que está a acontecer no nosso país e no mundo. Isto não é o futuro, é o presente. Em Itália, o Governo organiza uma comissão de censuradores encarregados, oficialmente,  de ‘limpar’ todas as notícias que se afastem das notícias oficiais. É a censura do Estado, como é que pode ser chamado de outra maneira? Também a RAI, a televisão pública, institui uma ‘task-force’ contra as “fake news” para apagar o rasto das suas mentiras diárias, que inundam todos os seus écrans de televisão.

E há, ainda pior, os misteriosos tribunais muito mais poderosos do que esses caçadores de ‘fake news’: são o Google e o Facebook, que manipulam as notícias e, com seus algoritmos e truques secretos, censuram sem apelação. Já estamos cercados de novos tribunais, que apagam os nossos direitos.

Recordam-se do artigo 21 da Constituição Italiana?

Está escrito: “Todos têm o direito de manifestar livremente o seu pensamento”.

Mas 60 milhões de italianos são forçados a ouvir um único altifalante, que grita através dos sete canais televisivos do poder.

Por esse motivo é que Julian Assange é um símbolo, uma bandeira, um convite para a reconquista dos direitos civis, políticos e económicos, para nos acordar antes que seja tarde demais.

É indispensável unir as forças que temos, que não são assim tão pequenas, mas têm um defeito crucial: o de estar divididas, incapazes de falar a uma só voz. Precisamos de um instrumento que fale aos milhões de cidadãos que querem saber”.

Estas são as últimas palavras de Giulietto Chiesa. Confirmadas pelo facto de que, imediatamente após a transmissão, o vídeo da Conferência ficou obscurecido, porque “o seu conteúdo foi identificado pela comunidade do YouTube, como sendo inapropriado ou ofensivo para certos tipos de público”.

Manlio Dinucci

Artigo original em italiano :

Giulietto Chiesa in prima linea fino all’ultimo

ilmanifesto.it

US policymakers from both right wings of the one-party state want China’s rise on the world stage as an economic, industrial, and technological power undermined.

A undeclared Cold War between both countries rages. There’s always risk of things turning hot by accident or design when US imperialists choose this option.

Much like US propaganda war and unacceptable policies against Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and other sovereign states free from US control, hostile anti-China venom rages in Washington.

It’s notably at a fever pitch, a tactic by Trump regime hardliners to falsely blame Beijing for DJT’s failed and wrongheaded policies to contain COVID-19 outbreaks.

No credible evidence suggests that the virus was produced in a Chinese biolab.

One or more outbreaks first occurred in Hawaii late last summer, not China. Nothing suggests the virus is bat or other wildlife-related.

Is COVID-19 a US-created bioweapon — unleashed on humanity with diabolical aims in mind?

It wouldn’t be the first time US policymakers used chemical, biological, radiological, and other banned weapons against adversaries and its own people.

It happened time and again throughout US history. Are COVID-19 outbreaks the latest example of US Machiavellian tactics against humanity for greater wealth and power at the expense of public health and welfare?

The fullness of time will tell whether diabolical US objectives are behind what’s going on. If past is prologue, it’s clearly possible.

Blaming others for its high crimes and malfeasance is longstanding US policy.

China is falsely blamed for the Trump regime’s failure to prepare for and properly address COVID-19 outbreaks when occurred — even though the threat of what’s ongoing was known about years ago.

Establishment media operate as mouthpieces for the imperial state, publishing and reporting material hostile to other countries that reads and sounds like intelligence community, state and war department press releases.

The NYT slammed China’s Red Cross this week. Because it receives state funding, the Times accused it of being “an arm of the state” instead of praising its human health mission.

Citing no evidence, the Times claimed “the group’s goal of helping people (is pitted) against the party’s interests in maintaining control over society.”

Far and away, China leads the world in addressing and containing COVID-19 outbreaks — in contrast to Trump regime blunders and indifference to public health and welfare.

The Times falsely accused China of letting “protective gear s(it) in a sprawling warehouse as desperate health workers battled the virus without it.”

China widely distributes personal protective equipment (PPE) internally, along with exporting it to scores of countries worldwide.

Months after US COVID-19 outbreaks occurred, National Nurses United continue to complain about lack of enough PPE — despite the Trump regime’s Department of Health and Human Services having declared virus outbreaks to be a national emergency on January 30.

Through mid-April, over 9,000 US healthcare professionals contracted COVID-19. Lack of enough proper PPE leaves them vulnerable, the Trump regime doing little to help states address an issue that should be prioritized.

The Times is a lying machine. The same goes for other US establishment media.

The neocon/CIA-connected Washington Post falsely blamed China for “spread(ing) the coronavirus by covering up initial reports about it (and) tr(ing) to use the pandemic to advance its authoritarian political model globally at the expense of democracy (sic).”

Separately, WaPo accused China of waging a “disinformation” campaign about the virus through “fake social media accounts (sic).”

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump regime “is tightening…export-control restrictions to prevent US companies from sending (high-tech) products abroad that could strengthen China’s military.”

The same policy applies to Russia, Venezuela and other invented US adversaries.

China’s Global Times (GT) said the Trump regime “is driving the US to failed state status,” the country already thirdworldized by its hostility to social justice.

Days earlier, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said through April 20, Beijing “provided the US with over 2.46 billion masks, meaning seven masks for each (person) in the US, plus nearly 5,000 ventilators and many other types of medical equipment.”

Yet PPE and other supplies needed to combat COVID-19 haven’t been sent to states, Dem governors notably complaining about lack of federal help in dealing with a public health emergency.

GT: “China does need to take a lesson from the US and examine why (its ruling authorities) failed to protect (their) people, (let the country fall) into political division (at a critical time, and is) stunned by corruption and unparalleled social divide?”

China won’t play “scapegoat” to US indifference toward its own people, to its botched handling of COVID-19 outbreaks.

An internal GOP document obtained by Politico shows “Republicans have indicated they plan to make China a centerpiece of the 2020 campaign,” according to the broadsheet.

The Trump regime succeeded in alienating countless millions of people worldwide.

A Morning Consult poll conducted from April 24 – 26 showed Trump with a 41% approval rating, 54% disapproving of his performance as president.

Other polls earlier in April showed similar results, Trump’s disapproval exceeding 50% in nearly all conducted, 56% in a Global Strategy Group/GBAO survey.

The latest Gallup poll conducted in mid-April showed Trump’s approval at 43%, disapproval at 54%.

He’s an embarrassment to the office he holds. The option for US voters in November is no better.

Both right wings of the US war party operate the same way at the expense of ordinary people at home and abroad.

Whatever the outcome of dealing with COVID-19, the worst of times likely lies ahead in the US.

Voting achieves nothing, a popular revolution the only solution for possible responsible change.

Power yields nothing without strong resistance, the only sensible option looking ahead.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Giulietto Chiesa è morto poche ore dopo aver concluso, nel 75° Anniversario della Liberazione e della fine della Seconda guerra mondiale, il Convegno internazionale del 25 Aprile «Liberiamoci dal virus della guerra». Un convegno in diretta streaming, organizzato dal Comitato No Guerra No Nato, di cui era uno dei fondatori, e da Global Research (Canada), il Centro di ricerca sulla globalizzazione diretto dal professor Michel Chossudovsky.

Diversi relatori – dall’Italia ad altri paesi europei, dagli Stati uniti alla Russia, dal Canada all’Australia – hanno esaminato le ragioni di fondo per cui dal 1945 ad oggi la guerra non è mai terminata: al Secondo conflitto mondiale ha fatto seguito la Guerra fredda, quindi una serie ininterrotta di guerre e il ritorno a una situazione analoga a quella della Guerra fredda che accresce il rischio di un conflitto nucleare.

Gli economisti Michel Chossudovsky (Canada), Peter Koenig (Svizzera) e Guido Grossi hanno spiegato come potenti forze economiche e finanziarie sfruttano la crisi del coronavirus per impadronirsi delle economie nazionali e cosa dovremmo fare per sventare tale piano.

David Swanson (direttore di World Beyond War, Usa), l’economista Tim Anderson (Australia), il fotogiornalista Giorgio Bianchi e lo storico Franco Cardini hanno parlato delle guerre passate e attuali, funzionali agli interessi delle stesse potenti forze.

L’esperto di questioni politico-militari Vladimir Kozin (Russia), la saggista Diana Johnstone (Usa),  la segretaria della Campagna per il disarmo nucleare Kate Hudson (Regno Unito) hanno esaminato i meccanismi che accrescono la probabilità di un catastrofico conflitto nucleare.

John Shipton (Australia), padre di Julian Assange, e Ann Wright (Usa), già colonnello dello US Army, hanno illustrato la drammatica situazione di Julian Assange, il giornalista fondatore di WikiLeaks detenuto a Londra, col rischio di essere estradato negli Stati Uniti dove lo attende la pena dell’ergastolo o quella di morte.

Su tale tema ha incentrato il suo intervento Giulietto Chiesa. Questi, in sintesi, alcuni brani:

«Il fatto che si voglia distruggere Julian Assange  vuol dire che anche noi, noi tutti, saremo imbavagliati, oscurati, minacciati, impossibilitati a capire cosa succede a casa nostra e nel mondo. Questo non è il futuro, è il presente. In Italia il governo organizza una squadra di censori ufficialmente incaricata di fare pulizia di tutte le notizie che divergono da quelle ufficiali. E’ la censura di stato, come altrimenti si può chiamare? Anche la Rai, la televisione pubblica, istituisce una task force contro le “fake news” per cancellare le tracce delle loro bugie quotidiane che inondano tutti i loro teleschermi.

E poi ci sono, ancor peggio, i tribunali misteriosi di gran lunga più potenti di quanto non siano questi cacciatori di fake news: sono Google, Facebook, che manipolano le notizie e, con i loro algoritmi e i loro trucchi segreti, censurano senza appello. Siamo già circondati da nuovi tribunali che cancellano i nostri diritti.

Vi ricordate l’articolo 21 della Costituzione italiana?

C’è scritto “tutti hanno diritto di manifestare liberamente il proprio pensiero”.

Ma 60 milioni di italiani sono costretti ad ascoltare un solo megafono che urla da tutti i 7 canali televisivi del potere.

Ecco perché Julian Assange è un simbolo, una bandiera, un invito alla riscossa, al risveglio prima che sia troppo tardi.

È indispensabile unire le forze che abbiamo, che non sono tanto piccole ma hanno un difetto fondamentale: quello di essere divise, incapaci di parlare con una voce unica.

Occorre uno strumento che parli ai milioni di cittadini che vogliono sapere».

Queste le ultime parole di Giulietto Chiesa. Confermate dal fatto che, subito dopo lo streaming, il video del Convegno è stato oscurato perché «il suo contenuto è stato identificato dalla Comunità YouTube inappropriato o offensivo per alcuni tipi di pubblico».

Manlio Dinucci

A rabid anti-China propaganda campaign has spread through the media since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. The hysteria seems to be just as contagious as the virus, as Americans are bombarded with anti-China stories from the pages of The New York Times to segments on Fox News. Both Republicans and Democrats are arguing the other side is not tough enough on China as they gear up for the 2020 election.

Since Donald Trump was elected president, the unfounded claim that Russia meddled in the 2016 election was spread far and wide by intelligence officials and liberal media outlets.

A common tactic used to promote the Russiagate narrative was unnamed officials making statements to the press without providing evidence or any factual basis to their claims. Another common tactic was frequent media appearances by former intelligence officials, like James Clapper and John Brennan, usually making wild accusations about Trump and Russia. These tactics are being repeated to promote an anti-China narrative.

The New York Times ran a story on April 22^nd titled, “Chinese Agents Helped Spread Messages That Sowed Virus Panic in US, Officials Say.” The article says rumors that were spread through text messages and social media posts in mid-March that claimed the Trump administration was going to lock down the entire country to combat coronavirus were boosted by “Chinese operatives.” The authors’ sources are “six American officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to publicly discuss intelligence matters.”

The story is lacking in detail and provides no evidence for the officials’ claims. “The origin of the messages remains murky. American officials declined to reveal details of the intelligence linking Chinese agents to the dissemination of the disinformation, citing the need to protect their sources and methods for monitoring Beijing’s activities,” the story reads. Two of the officials told the Times that “they did not believe Chinese operatives created the lockdown messages, but rather amplified existing ones.”

Sensationalized reporting in the Times would not be complete without mentioning the Russians. “American officials said the operatives had adopted some of the techniques mastered by Russia-backed trolls, such as creating fake social media accounts to push messages to sympathetic Americans, who in turn unwittingly help spread them.”

Ironically, the story recognizes the danger of US officials making selective leaks to the media. “Foreign policy analysts are worried that the Trump administration may politicize intelligence work or make selective leaks to promote an anti-China narrative … American officials in the past have selectively passed intelligence to reporters to shape the domestic political landscape.” The Times uses the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq as an example of the dangers of selective leaks, ignoring the past four years of Russiagate stories that plagued its pages.

On April 17^th, Fox News Host Tucker Carlson had former CIA officer Bryan Dean Wright on his show to deliver some wild accusations about US politicians and the Chinese government. Wright insinuated that some members of Congress might be agents of China’s intelligence service, the Ministry of State Security (MSS). Carlson explained to Wright that the show reached out to Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and other elected officials to ask if they’ve had contact with any Chinese officials since the coronavirus outbreak began. Carlson said they did not respond and asked Wright, “What do you think we should infer from that?”

Wright responded, “I think that they’re nervous. I think there are a bunch of people who, because they’re either useful idiots or they have some degree of knowledge and relationships behind the scenes with the Chinese government. Some of them in fact could be Chinese agents of the MSS.” Wright’s language comes straight from the Russiagate playbook. Intelligence officials and media pundits often referred to Trump as a “useful idiot” for Moscow, and some even speculated that the president is a “Russian agent.”

Trump’s anti-Russia policies show that he is not working in the White House on behalf of Vladimir Putin. Similarly, anti-China legislation that has recently passed through the House and Senate makes it unlikely any MSS agents are working in the halls of Congress.

The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act passed unanimously through the Senate last year and had one lone nay vote in the House from Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY). The act, which was signed into law by President Trump, requires the State Department to prepare an annual report on the autonomy of Hong Kong from mainland China. The act also requires the Commerce Department to report on “China’s efforts to use Hong Kong to evade US export controls.” The bill says the president shall present Congress with a list of any individuals that violate human rights in Hong Kong. Any findings that are unsatisfactory to the US could result in sanctions.

The Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act was also passed unanimously through the Senate, and again, Rep. Massie was the only one to vote against the bill in the House. This bill, which has not made it to President Trump’s desk, would require the US to impose sanctions and export restrictions over China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims in the western autonomous region of Xinjiang.

Rep. Massie, the sole dissenting voice in Congress, did not vote against these bills because of any loyalty to Beijing or Xi Jinping. “When our government meddles in the internal affairs of foreign countries, it invites those governments to meddle in our affairs,” Massie wrote on Twitter, explaining his votes.

The Taiwan Allies International Protection and Enhancement Initiative (TAIPEI) Act, which was signed into law by President Trump in March, passed unanimously through both the House and Senate, with Rep. Massie finally falling in line with his colleague’s anti-China policy. The TAIPEI Act says the US should “help strengthen Taiwan’s diplomatic relationships and partnerships around the world.”

Taiwan remains the most sensitive issue between the US and China, since Beijing considers the island to be a part of China. Although the US does not formally recognize Taiwan as an independent nation, Washington supplies the island with arms and frequently sails warships through the Taiwan strait, drawing the ire of Beijing. No members of Congress speak out against these provocations. Like the accusations about Trump and Russia, the idea that Congress is crawling with agents of Beijing is easily disproven by actual policy.

Tucker Carlson did not challenge any of Wright’s outrageous claims but instead nodded along. Since the start of the outbreak, Carlson’s show has focused on putting all the blame for the coronavirus pandemic on Beijing. Carlson’s recent content reflects the strategy of the White House. The Daily Beast obtained internal White House documents in March that showed the administration was pushing US officials to blame China for a “cover-up” in the early days of the outbreak. The strategy has proven useful as many pro-Trump media outlets put Beijing’s response to the pandemic under a microscope, and largely ignore the US government’s early missteps.

Politico obtained a memo sent by the National Republican Senatorial Committee to GOP campaigns. The memo outlines an anti-China strategy for Republicans running for office in 2020. The document advises candidates to blame the pandemic on China, say Democratic opponents are too soft on China, and advocate for sanctions against Beijing. The memo is full of strong rhetoric like, “China is not an ally, and they’re not just a rival — they are an adversary and the Chinese Communist Party is our enemy.”

The GOP guidelines are similar to the rhetoric coming from China hardlinerslike former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon. In March 2019, Bannon and neoconservative Frank Gaffney founded the Committee on Present Danger: China, a think-tank that identifies China as the greatest “existential threat” to the United States. In his almost-daily podcast, Bannon rails against Beijing and pins all the blame for the pandemic on China. “The Chinese Communist Party is at war with their people, they’re at war with the world, and they’re at war with you … You may not have an interest in the Chinese Communist Party but its destroyed your life. OK? Your economic life, your spiritual life, your social life. The destruction is from Beijing,” Bannon said in a recent episode.

Republicans and right-wingers are not the only ones looking to attack China this election season. The Biden campaign released an ad on April 18^th that attacked Trump for his response to the virus. The ad said, “Trump rolled over for the Chinese” and criticized how much the president praised China’s handling of the pandemic early on. “Trump praised the Chinese 15 times in January and February as the coronavirus spread across the world,” the ad said.

The anti-China propaganda seems to be turning public opinion against Beijing. A new poll from the Pew Research Center that surveyed 1,000 adults throughout March found that 66 percent have an unfavorable view of China, an increase of 14 percent since Pew last asked the question in 2018. Nine out of 10 adults surveyed view China as a threat, including 62 percent who see China as a major threat.

China may have made some mistakes in its early response to the virus, but that does not excuse the US government’s lack of preparedness, and treating the pandemic as an attack sets a dangerous precedent for future outbreaks. The strategy could backfire on Washington if any future pandemics originate in the US.

Like Russiagate, the anti-China propaganda will serve as a useful tool for a national security state that is looking to focus more on great power competition. The Pentagon identifies China as its number one priority and is looking to increase its footprint in the Indo-Pacific region. The constant propaganda will make that increased presence more palatable to the American people. But that increased presence will bring more confrontation between the US and China, and bring the region and the world closer to nuclear war.

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Dave DeCamp is assistant editor at Antiwar.com and a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn NY, focusing on US foreign policy and wars. He is on Twitter at @decampdave.